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gobsjungalist
January 23rd, 2019, 04:12 PM
I recently reinstalled Ubuntu 18.04 with a new laptop which has a 1 TB HDD and 256 SSD. I followed these instructions (https://askubuntu.com/questions/194457/installing-ubuntu-os-on-ssd-and-install-home-on-other-hdd) more or less for the installation, however I would like to encrypt my home directory as well. Is there an easy (preferably GUI) way of doing that?

TheFu
January 23rd, 2019, 11:03 PM
Home directory encryption was removed from Ubuntu 18.04+ due to a number of reasons. Performance, maintennce and security failures. This link explains a little more:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ecryptfs-utils/+bug/1756840 is a bug about this feature missing.

You can encrypt subdirectories, but I'd be careful which I did. I would avoid encrypting ~/.config/, for example.

https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/ecryptfs.html.en might be helpful. It is for 18.04 server, so not a GUI for encrypting.

I don't know 18.04, but in 16.04 using the Mate file manager, caja, some encrypted storage is recognized and GUI prompts come up to provide decryption when accessed. I had an external dm-crypt USB drive and Caja prompted. I've not used any GUI to encrypt stuff, sorry.

Dennis N
January 23rd, 2019, 11:34 PM
You can encrypt a file or directory from the file manager using gnupg by right click on the file/folder and select 'encrypt' when you have seahorse and the seahorse-nautilus plugin installed.

There are then two sets of options presented:
Type of encryption:
1) passphrase (symmetric) or 2) public-key (asymmetric) encryption
and
How it's done:
1) encrypt the files separately or 2) make an single archive of all files and then encrypt the archive.

gobsjungalist
January 24th, 2019, 02:25 PM
Thank you for the replies, the seahorse plugin looks useful. However, I managed to find what I was looking for eventually:
https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/04/how-to-encrypt-home-folder-in-ubuntu.html

TheFu
January 24th, 2019, 04:02 PM
Thank you for the replies, the seahorse plugin looks useful. However, I managed to find what I was looking for eventually:
https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/04/how-to-encrypt-home-folder-in-ubuntu.html

Please keep excellent backups. There will be a large risk at every OS migration for something bad to happen. Even weekly patching may cause issues with encrypted HOME access, so create a non-encrypted userid to be used as a backup way into the machine.

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