This steps will work in a server environment
Step 1: Backup your home directory
sudo cp -rp /home/$USER /home/$USER.backup
Step 2: Confirm whether everything is backup
sudo ls -al /home/$USER.backup
Step 3: Umount the home folder, because the encryption program usually mounts it to mount point e.g /home/$USER
,also known as $HOME
. You can confirm your mount point by running df -h $HOME
. You will have to cd /tmp
(or some other non-$HOME
directory) to be able to unmount $HOME
cd /tmp
sudo umount /home/$USER
Step 4: Delete the old home folder
sudo rm -rf /home/$USER
Step 5: Remove encrytion program file
sudo rm -rf /home/$USER.backup/.ecryptfs
Step 6: Remove encryption utillities from the system
sudo apt-get remove ecryptfs-utils libecryptfs0
Step 7: Restore unencrypted home folder back to it original path
sudo mv /home/$USER.backup /home/$USER
Step 8: Change ownership of the restored folder back to your user
sudo chown -R $(id -u):$(id -g) /home/$USER
Step 9: Logout/Login, to be sure all user stuff gets restarted right (or that errors will occur while you remember what you're done)