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EDIT 1: I reinstalled 16.04 having booted through the CD but with the HDD installed, now I can read the "readme.txt" and I can click on the "access-your-private-data.desktop" and it seems to run for a few minutes without a window opening and then it stops. When I try running sudo ecryptfs-recover-private I get 

INFO: Searching for encrypted private directories (this might take a while)...
find: ‘/run/user/1000/gvfs’: Permission denied

I have a Lenovo E540 (i7) with a 16GB SSD and 1TB HDD. I had the system and swap on the SSD and my data (/home) on the HDD. I tried updating from 14.04 to 16.04. I got asked to confirm the driver EULA but I couldn't select the "OK". I quit the installation. After trying to boot up all I got was an empty screen. I created a 16.04 live cd on a different machine and booted up with that. I removed my hdd prior to this because I didn't want to risk loosing any data. After the installation I shut the notebook down and installed the HDD. I booted up and my HDD appears as a volume and when opened there's two files "access-your-private-data.desktop" "readme.txt" neither of which I can open. I had all my files on the HDD, please help me.

chaosdoom
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4 Answers4

3

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.

Obsidian Jackal
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Xen2050
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0

I had similar errors after I renamed the previous (original) POSIX username to old_user (and ) and then created a new user with the original (previous username's) name.

To be able to mount the encrypted home directory from the old_user, I had to remake the symbolik links for .encryptfs and .Private in its folder (as they had poinded to /home/original_name/).

After that, the following command mounted the old home without any problem. /usr/bin/ecryptfs-recover-private /home/old_user/.Private

Yaroslav Fedorina
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I upgraded 15.10 to 16.04 and when trying to access my .private folder on an external drive from a backup with sudo ecryptfs-recover-private I was getting the same error. When I did the same thing from another 14.04 notebook everything was working as it should. So this might be a problem with 16.04?

Consumology
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I had this exact problem, too, and all I had to do was unmount the /gvfs directory using the command umount /run/user/1000/gvfs. I then ran the command ecryptfs-recovery-private and it worked. I know how freaked out I was when thinking I had lost my information.

UTF-8
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dr4c4n
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