Today I had a huge scare accidentally changing my laptop password to a keepass-generated 64-alphadigit string, locking me out of my encrypted homedir. My login password was stored in a keepass file on the encrypted homedir, mounted on a locked desktop which I could not unlock due to the password change. Luckily I have my mount passphrase and was easily able to have ecryptfs-recover-private
mount to files on some /tmp
-folder.
However, I don't just want to recover my files, also the operational part of my laptop automatically mounting them whenever I login, without accidentally destroying something that could indefinitely remove my access to the files. Hence Try-all and error of commands is not OK, I can easily do something I will regret. I could not find anything on the official ubuntu-page:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedPrivateDirectory#Not_covered_in_this_tutorial
How do I reconfigure my encrypted homedir with my operating system and user account to function as before, given that my login-password is gone but my mount passphrase is available? Should I copy all my files to a proxy storage? The latter would be a pain, since I don't have the storage to duplicate my homedir.
.ecryptfs/wrapped-passphrase
file or even the output ofecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase
to back up the encryption key and put them in a safe location.