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Is there something I should be taking in to account when moving an encrypted home directory to a new drive? Is it just enough to rsync the contents away, edit fstab etc?

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1 Answer

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What I would do:

  • Be sure to have no user logged when doing the copy, so that encrypted directories are not mounted.
  • Copy the whole /home/, as there is a /home/.ecryptfs which I think contains all the encrypted data.
  • As root, run rsync -av /home/ /other/disk/home/ in order to preserve all file attributes.
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In the end I tried to remove the encryption and then just move and re-enable the encryption. Which didn't go so well so I just reinstalled Ubuntu and used a backup. One thing which I wasn't so sure was that the encryptfs makes a hidden mount (if I'm correct), wasn't sure if just moving all the files would be enough. – Guu Aug 20 '12 at 10:56

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