Deactivate encryption for /home folders & change mountpoint for /home folder

[chnorth]

Hello!

I have just installed the new release of ubuntu 9.04.
While installing I chose to have my /home folders encrypted.
Now I would like to get rid of this encryption as I am to afraid to somehow lose my data and never be able to decrypt it.

And - I would like to move my /home folder to a seperate partition.

Both things I should probably have done while setting up.

Is there a way to change things from a running system?

Thanks a lot!

chnorth

[chnorth]

No ideas how to turn of the home folder encryption?

Might it be enough to take the user out of the FUSE-Group?
with
$ sudo fuse deluser username

??
Or is this to much?

Thank you for any help!

chnorth

[bajun]

I have the same question. I need to move my encrypted /home to separate partition. Can I simply move my /home without extra steps?

Update..- I have moved my /home to separate partition inside live CD (another distribution), old /home and new partition was mounted and encrypted data was just placed on new partition without any problems (by copying). fstab was edited. Everething works.

[rominet7777]

Hi,

Just had the same problem, and just found the solution...

1st thing to do : BACKUP YOUR HOME
I can't say it louder... basically undoing encryption is equivalent to resetting (rm -rf) your home, which is in fact hidden by a mount.

2nd step : log out of any desktop manager and go to a virtual console (CTRL-ALT-F1)

Finally : for details :

$ ecryptfs-setup-private --undo

In the event that you want to remove your eCryptfs Private Directory setup,
you will need to very carefully perform the following actions manually:

1. Obtain your Private directory mountpoint
$ PRIVATE=`cat ~/.ecryptfs/Private.mnt 2>/dev/null || echo $HOME/Private`
2. Ensure that you have moved all relevant data out of your $PRIVATE directory
3. Unmount your encrypted private directory
$ ecryptfs-umount-private
4. Make your Private directory writable again
$ chmod 700 $PRIVATE
5. Remove $PRIVATE, ~/.Private, ~/.ecryptfs
Note: THIS IS VERY PERMANENT, BE VERY CAREFUL
$ rm -rf $PRIVATE ~/.Private ~/.ecryptfs
6. Uninstall the utilities (this is specific to your Linux distribution)
$ sudo apt-get remove ecryptfs-utils libecryptfs0

I would say step 5 is a bit wrong : there's no need to delete $PRIVATE, which was for me my home....

After .Private and .ecryptfs deletion, just restore your home :]

Cheers

[Aviendha09]

Yikes! I want to get rid of the encryption but I don't understand the procedure...stuck after the command :

1. Obtain your Private directory mountpoint
$ PRIVATE=`cat ~/.ecryptfs/Private.mnt 2>/dev/null || echo $HOME/Private`

expected a return (?)...didn't get any...what now?

[undecim]

Yikes! I want to get rid of the encryption but I don't understand the procedure...stuck after the command :

1. Obtain your Private directory mountpoint
$ PRIVATE=`cat ~/.ecryptfs/Private.mnt 2>/dev/null || echo $HOME/Private`

expected a return (?)...didn't get any...what now?

That's because the output of cat is going to the PRIVATE variable. If you want to check it, type "echo $PRIVATE"

[jemmrich]

Hi,

Just had the same problem, and just found the solution...

1st thing to do : BACKUP YOUR HOME
I can't say it louder... basically undoing encryption is equivalent to resetting (rm -rf) your home, which is in fact hidden by a mount.

2nd step : log out of any desktop manager and go to a virtual console (CTRL-ALT-F1)

Finally : for details :

$ ecryptfs-setup-private --undo

In the event that you want to remove your eCryptfs Private Directory setup,
you will need to very carefully perform the following actions manually:

1. Obtain your Private directory mountpoint
$ PRIVATE=`cat ~/.ecryptfs/Private.mnt 2>/dev/null || echo $HOME/Private`
2. Ensure that you have moved all relevant data out of your $PRIVATE directory
3. Unmount your encrypted private directory
$ ecryptfs-umount-private
4. Make your Private directory writable again
$ chmod 700 $PRIVATE
5. Remove $PRIVATE, ~/.Private, ~/.ecryptfs
Note: THIS IS VERY PERMANENT, BE VERY CAREFUL
$ rm -rf $PRIVATE ~/.Private ~/.ecryptfs
6. Uninstall the utilities (this is specific to your Linux distribution)
$ sudo apt-get remove ecryptfs-utils libecryptfs0

I would say step 5 is a bit wrong : there's no need to delete $PRIVATE, which was for me my home....

After .Private and .ecryptfs deletion, just restore your home :]

Cheers

Not to bring up an old thread but in case anyone has errors trying to follow these instructions, here is what I did.

1. Backup the home directory while you are logged in
sudo cp -rp /home/user /home/user.backup
1.1. Check that your home backup has everything!!!
2. reboot into root via grub
3. Delete your home directory
rm -rf /home/user
4. Remove the packages
apt-get remove ecryptfs-utils libecryptfs0
5. Restore your home directory
mv /home/user.backup /home/user
6. reboot
7. Remove any of those .Private .ecryptfs folders
rm -rf ~/.Private
rm -rf ~/.ecryptfs
8. Yay!

This worked for me. Home folder file permissions stay intact and does not bugger up Dropbox or git repos. Some reason my fresh install on Ubuntu 9.10 would not do the first command. Just make sure you think the process through when using rm -rf.

Just wanted to post this not only for my record, but anyone else who encounters problems.

[webdevelopment1]

i accidentally removed all my packages in synaptic so now i dont have a GUI it just lets me log into the command prompt as my username...

while logged in i can access my encrypted data, but i can't get it out of my /home/user directory

any tips?

i'd like to copy the encrypted data out onto another hard drive but its not letting me do that...

[vcrpex]

Not to bring up an old thread but in case anyone has errors trying to follow these instructions, here is what I did.

1. Backup the home directory while you are logged in
sudo cp -rp /home/user /home/user.backup
1.1. Check that your home backup has everything!!!
2. reboot into root via grub
3. Delete your home directory
rm -rf /home/user
4. Remove the packages
apt-get remove ecryptfs-utils libecryptfs0
5. Restore your home directory
mv /home/user.backup /home/user
6. reboot
7. Remove any of those .Private .ecryptfs folders
rm -rf ~/.Private
rm -rf ~/.ecryptfs
8. Yay!

This worked for me. Home folder file permissions stay intact and does not bugger up Dropbox or git repos. Some reason my fresh install on Ubuntu 9.10 would not do the first command. Just make sure you think the process through when using rm -rf.

Just wanted to post this not only for my record, but anyone else who encounters problems.

Thanks Jemmrich for the steps. Just followed your steps to remove the encryption on my home drive. it was simply too slow when i read virtualbox on the encrypted drive. Thanks alot.

[lorriman]

Not to bring up an old thread but in case anyone has errors trying to follow these instructions, here is what I did.

1. Backup the home directory while you are logged in
sudo cp -rp /home/user /home/user.backup

For anyone following jemmrich's advice you may get stuck at this point due to a hidden '.gvfs' (FUSE) mount point that results in an access denied failure of the copying even despite the -p flag.

The solution is to use rsync with an exclusion. See here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=791693. It worked for me.