ecryptfs-recover-private(1)

📦 version 111, in alpine 3.24, arch rolling, debian bookworm, debian trixie, fedora 43, fedora 44, opensuse-leap 16.0, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

✨ ecryptfs-recover-private ✨

okay bestie, so this is the manual for ecryptfs-recover-private(1), which lives in the eCryptfs family and is literally your rescue bestie when you think your encrypted home is gone forever 💖

🎀 NAME 🎀

ecryptfs-recover-private — find and mount any encrypted private directories

like. that's the whole job. find them. mount them. slay. 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

ecryptfs-recover-private [--rw] [encrypted private dir]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so picture this: you've got an encrypted home, or an encrypted private partition, and you need that data back. this utility is specifically built to help you recover data from exactly those two things. it's giving rescue mission energy 🫶

it is super useful to run this from a LiveISO or a recovery image — like, that's the vibe it was made for. and it must run under sudo(8) or with root permission, because it needs to search the filesystem and do the mounts. no root, no service, periodt. 👑

the program can take a target encrypted directory right there on the command line. if you don't specify one, the utility will search the entire system looking for encrypted private directories, as configured by ecryptfs-setup-private(1). the way that it just goes looking for you… iconic. 🔍✨

if an encrypted directory and a wrapped-passphrase file are found, the user is prompted for the login (wrapping) passphrase, the keys are inserted into the keyring, and then the data is decrypted and mounted. the whole glow-up sequence, honestly. 🔥

if no wrapped-passphrase file is found, you'll be prompted for your mount passphrase instead. that passphrase is typically 32 characters of [0-9a-f]. and listen — all users are prompted to urgently record this randomly generated passphrase when they first setup their encrypted private directory. like genuinely urgent, not "I'll do it later" urgent. write it down. put it in a vault. protect it with your life. 😭📝

the destination mount of the decrypted data is a temporary directory, in the form of /tmp/ecryptfs.XXXXXXXX.

by default, the mount will be read-only. to mount with read and write permission, add the --rw parameter. so if you're just peeking, do nothing; if you need to actually write stuff back, that's your flag bestie 💜

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

👑 AUTHOR 👑

this manpage was written by Dustin Kirkland <kirkland@ubuntu.com> for Ubuntu systems (but may be used by others). permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

on Debian and Ubuntu systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.

and that's the whole page, bestie 🎀 this one shipped as part of ecryptfs-utils, dated 2010-12-17, so go forth and recover those directories. you got this fr fr 💖✨🦋

📦 where this page comes from