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I use Kubuntu 12.04. It's a relatively new install and when I created my account I had the option to have it encrypt my home folder. I chose to do that. Now I would like to turn that off. I opened up the System Settings app and went through every single setting in there and it doesn't appear there is any way to reverse this process.

Is it impossible?

Also, after I disable home folder encryption I would like to set up full disk encryption. I installed Truecrypt only to find that it only supports full disk encryption with Windows(ugh...).

How would I go about setting this up? Why is this so unintuitive?

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possible duplicate of How to stop using built-in home directory encryption? – hhlp May 19 '12 at 19:19

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If you are sure that you need full disk encryption, you might better consider backup the current data and do a reinstall.

A new installation will give options on

  • LUKS encrypted swap partition
  • LUKS encrypted / filesystem
  • LUKS encrypted /home partition (if its not under /)

excpt encrypted /boot filesystem.

Btw, installer uses eCryptfs for user home encryption, which is slower than LUKS encryption.

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Thank you for the speedy response. I am curious whether there is another option because currently I am lucky to get 15KB/s download speed(and the connection drops constantly) which would make it very frustrating to reinstall all the updates and applications I currently have on my system. I spent a long time getting it set up exactly the way I like it and I don't know if I have the patience to do it all over again. – linuxguy May 16 '12 at 6:25
Or perhaps there is a way for me to create an installer for all my applications that I can put on a flash drive so that i don't even need an internet connection – linuxguy May 16 '12 at 6:39
yw, I use apt-cacher-ng, which is a package cache for incoming packages, let it own a separated partition can be a good idea :) – Rony May 16 '12 at 6:52
Adding full disk encryption to an existing system is not for the faint of heart. Unless you know how to use LVM, luks/cryptsetup, and chroot, you're going to need to do a full reinstall. You should also be aware that you'll get an extra password prompt before booting. – neon_overload May 16 '12 at 6:57
In reference to the comment about ecryptfs being slower than LUKS, this is not the full story: ecryptfs would only encrypt the home directory, whereas LUKS would be encrypting the entire system including frequently-used directories like /var, /tmp, /usr and more. – neon_overload May 16 '12 at 7:00

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