During the process of recovering an encrypted filesystem from an old server of mine, I found that I couldn’t access any of the data. It appears that I encrypted my home folder on the server using Ubuntu’s default ecryptfs.

I ‘Googled’ my way through locating the encrypted ‘.Private’ folder and tried unsuccessfully to mount the folder. I then used ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase to unwrap my unique passphrase using the old login password.

Armed with that and a tool from Dustin Kirkland over at Canonical (ecrypt-recover-private) I succeeded in using the following command to recover my data sudo ecryptfs-recover-private .Private(at appropriate location) (Note - replace .Private with whichever location it’s at) Then type in the login password, which yields the passphrase, which leads to mounting the data as a read-only directory in /tmp.

Thanks Canonical!