I probably did a few things wrong on my Ubuntu installation, and I hope that someone here can help me fix that. I'll try to describe in details what I did, if you need more technical detail ask me in comments; I suppose I can edit the message and provide some logs or the results of certain specific commands if that helps for the diagnostic.

(1) Upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04

For a few weeks I've got the warning message from Dropbox stating that it will stop working in my system, and after research, I understood that it was because I was using encryption via ecryptfs (I was on Ubuntu 16.04, using ext4 file system). Note that I do not really understand how ecryptfs works; encryption via .ecryptfs was very probably done automagically when I installed 16.04. Though I still have (in an external HD) a textfile with a passphrase for encryption (this is a 32-digits hex number) that I probably saved at that time.

I've read that Ubuntu 18.04 solves this Dropbox issue because it doesn't use ecryptfs (rather LUKS, which is global encryption and accepted by Dropbox). Anyway, I don't really care (for the time being) about encryption, I just wanted to be able to continue using Dropbox without going to the hassle of quickly finding and installing an alternative. So I upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 a few days ago. It went well (except for a notable slowdown, apparently partially because of the process baloo_file_extractor, but this is another story).

But this didn't solve the issue since I still had ecryptfs encryption installed, and still got the warning message from Dropbox.

(2) Tried to remove ecryptfs encryption

(In retrospect I should have asked here or another forum how to do that: the only helps I found via google searching were rather old and maybe obsolete and unreliable.) I followed (to the letter) the following how-to:

• created a backup copy (/home/vivien.backup) of the /home/vivien directory
• logged out, and logged in to another admin account
• deleted the /home/vivien directory
• deleted the folder /home/
• sudo apt-get remove ecryptfs-utils libecryptfs0
• sudo mv /home/vivien.backup /home/vivien

Note: After deleting the folder /home/ I noticed that there was another .ecryptfs folder, inside the /home folder (but not inside the vivien/ or ). I was not sure whether I should delete it as well, so I didn't delete it.

(3) First results (could log in, but lost configuration files)

When I logged in again in my normal account, it was as if I had reinstalled Ubuntu from scratch (every change in the configuration that I had done was not there anymore, I got the default configuration, and even the welcome messages of Ubuntu). So I may have lost all my configuration files. In particular, all my firefox bookmarks/history had disappeared (fortunately I had a back-up via Firefox Sync). This is not my main issue though. I also noticed everything was very (very) slow. So after maybe 30 minutes I decided to reboot.

(4) Second results (after rebooting, cannot log in)

When I wanted to log in again, this didn't work: namely, I click on my name, I enter my password, the screen becomes black and then displays again the login screen. I logged in to the secondary admin account. This is what I get:

root@Cleobule3:~# cd /home/vivien/
root@Cleobule3:/home/vivien# ls
Access-Your-Private-Data.desktop README.txt

And these two files are unreadable. For example, if I click on the read-me file in Nautilus (launched as root), I get a pop-up window that says: "The link "README.txt" is broken. Move it to Trash? The link cannot be used because its target "/use/share/ecryptfs-utils/ecrypts-mount-private.txt" doesn't exist."

If I look into the /home folder, there is still the .ecryptfs folder:

root@Cleobule3:~# cd /home
root@Cleobule3:/home# ls -all
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Nov 7 01:59 .
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 Oct 29 00:35 ..
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jun 17 2017 .ecryptfs
drwxr-xr-x 18 tempadmin tempadmin 4096 Nov 7 11:16 tempadmin
dr-x------ 3 vivien vivien 4096 Nov 7 09:45 vivien
root@Cleobule3:/home# cd .ecryptfs/
root@Cleobule3:/home/.ecryptfs# ls
vivien
root@Cleobule3:/home/.ecryptfs# cd vivien/
root@Cleobule3:/home/.ecryptfs/vivien# ls -all
total 36
drwxr-xr-x 4 vivien vivien 4096 Jun 17 2017 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jun 17 2017 ..
drwx------ 2 vivien vivien 4096 Nov 6 08:09 .ecryptfs
drwx------ 30 vivien vivien 20480 Nov 7 09:36 .Private
root@Cleobule3:/home/.ecryptfs/vivien# cd .ecryptfs/
root@Cleobule3:/home/.ecryptfs/vivien/.ecryptfs# ls -all
total 20
drwx------ 2 vivien vivien 4096 Nov 6 08:09 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 vivien vivien 4096 Jun 17 2017 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 vivien vivien 0 Jun 17 2017 auto-mount
-rw-r--r-- 1 vivien vivien 0 Jun 17 2017 auto-umount
-rw------- 1 vivien vivien 13 Jun 17 2017 Private.mnt
-rw------- 1 vivien vivien 34 Jun 17 2017 Private.sig
-rw------- 1 vivien vivien 58 Jun 17 2017 wrapped-passphrase
-rw-rw-r-- 1 vivien vivien 0 Jun 17 2017 .wrapped-passphrase.recorded

And in /home/.ecryptfs/vivien/.Private there are a lot of files with weird names that are very probably my encrypted files.

I guess all this must make sense to someone who understands the ecryptfs encryption, but as a relative noob I feel overwhelmed. Did I lose all my files (well, I have some partial back-up somewhere, but not all), or is there a way to salvage this mess? I see that there are some similar questions here, but I'm a bit hesitant now of trying random things without the help of someone who knows what they're doing. Thank you in advance for any help.

1 Answer

I solved the problem myself, inspired by the discussion in another question (I accidentally removed my ecryptfs-utils package. Now I cannot log in. Any chance to regain access to the home directory?)

I simply reinstalled ecryptfs-utils, using my secondary admin account. I was not sure this would work (the discussion seems to imply that the method of encryption of ecryptfs may depend on the version, so trying to decrypt with a newer version might not work). But after rebooting I was allowed to log in again with my primary account. This doesn't solve my initial issue, but this answers the question here.