Ubuntu – I accidentally removed the ecryptfs-utils package. Now I cannot log in. Any chance to regain access to the home directory

ecryptfsencryptionfilesystemmount

I accidentally removed my ecryptfs-utils package using sudo remove ecryptfs-utils. Is there any way I could regain access to the home directory?

When I try to log in now I just get looped back to the login screen. I can open a tty terminal and all it says in the home directory is: Access-Your-Private-Data.desktop and README.txt

The README.txt file says:

"THIS DIRECTORY HAS BEEN UNMOUNTED TO PROTECT YOUR DATA

From the graphical desktop, click on:

"Access Your Private Data"

or

From the command line, run:

ecryptfs-mount-private

I'm using Ubuntu 16.10.

Update: I tried to copy the ecryptfs files from /usr/share and /usr/bin on another machine and that didn't work. (I think I got some password incorrect errors). However, that machine was running Raspbian. I wasn't able to install from tty by downloading ecryptfs-utils for some reason, got some IP's not found errors, although the Internet connection seems to work otherwise.

Best Answer

I solved this after many many attempts over several months with rest in between. From login screen I went to TTY1 and logged in as sudoer. Then I could not install ecryptfs-utils for a long time which turned out to be caused probably by Ubuntu not supporting Wily anymore. So I went to /etc/apt/sources.list and changed all instances of the word wily to xenial and after that I could reinstall ecryptfs-utils. Maybe it's one of those things that shouldn't work but actually did.

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There is a few things you can try. The error message you get is itself helpful: the directory is not mounted.

If you get this type of files CRYPTFS_FNEK_ENCRYPTED.[some code here] in fact the decryption was not succesful. That means something went wrong in the decryption process (usually the problem is related to the settings you provide in the prompt). Make sure to type the full passphrase in gedit and copy it from there. I once already spend two days figuring out what went wrong decrypting and for some reason I had a tiny mistake (O as 0) in the passphrase.

You can also give this command a try:

mount -t ecryptfs [SRC DIR] [DST DIR] -o [OPTIONS]

This will do the mounting and decrypting for you. Read more here and don't stick too close to that tutorial you mention.

BTW: Is your username the same as on the old system?

Ubuntu – “sudo ecryptfs-recover-private” gives “find: ‘/run/user/1000/gvfs’: Permission denied” after botched (?) upgrade

ecryptfs-recover-private doesn't have to search through every file, if you add where your old encrypted home at the end then it will only look there. For example ecryptfs-recover-private /location/to/search.

You can search yourself, looking for any encrypted files, for example with a GUI search utility, or
find [mountpoint] -type f -iname "*ecryptfs*"

To see exactly what ecryptfs-recover-private does, just look at it, it's a bash script. Running this would display it with less:
less $( which ecryptfs-recover-private )

And it's search is this:
find / -type d -name ".Private"

You're probably just seeing regular "permission denied" errors if you tried searching everything everywhere, some folders don't want to be searched. Your home's not supposed to be in /run/user/1000/gvfs anyway so don't worry about it.

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – “sudo ecryptfs-recover-private” gives “find: ‘/run/user/1000/gvfs’: Permission denied” after botched (?) upgrade

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