I am trying to reinstall, but I want to backup my encrypted home first, so I booted up from a live CD, mounted the hard drive, ran sudo ecryptfs-recover-private <home directory here> and it asked for my passphrase.
I entered it, said it was successful and mounted it it in "/tmp/ecryptfs.somethingsomething" . I go there, using a root nautilus, and double click on the .desktop entry, and it just spawns a terminal window that instantly vanishes.
I checked the readme file and it says that its running ecryptfs-mount-private, so when I run that in terminal myself, it says "ERROR: Encrypted private directory is not setup properly".
I've googled around and cannot find an answer, since it tells you to recover it using ecryptfs-recover-private, but that obviously isn't' working…
Best Answer
I figured out my problem. I was running the command and giving it my HOME directory, and for some reason it was saying it was successful in mounting it. However, it was lying. Turns out you need to run the command with the .Private folder that each user has, its located in
The command is supposed to recurse and find that folder for you, but I was impatient and gave it my home folder. I'm not sure why it said it was successful when it clearly wasn't, but if you give it that .Private folder, and then enter your login password, it should mount it to a folder inside /tmp/ and you can do whatever else you want to do with the data =)