eCryptfs

How to backup a mounted ecryptfs volume?

Asked by Michael Schuerig

Let's say my entire encrypted home directory is in /home/michael/.Private and gets mounted to /home/michael. In this case, I can't at the same time access encrypted as well as decrypted views of my files. I want this in order to make backups while using my computer.

In http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7568/1.html Dustin Kirkland writes:

"Since each encrypted file is written to disk as an atomic unit, users can perform per-file incremental encrypted backups to remote storage – something that is impractical and dangerous with block device encryption solutions."

However, I don't see how this is supposed to work.

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Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland) said : 		#1

What version of Ubuntu are you running?

If you installed 9.10 or later, your encrypted data is actually in
/home/.ecryptfs/$USER/.Private/. This is what you'll want to backup.

If you installed with something before 9.04, you might want to follow
the instructions at:
 * http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2009/08/moving-your-encrypted-home-meta-data.html
and then you should have easier access to your encrypted data.

:-Dustin

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