[ubuntu-uk] Encrypted Directories

[James Westby]

On Mon, 2008-10-06 at 21:59 +0100, Ian Pascoe wrote:
> Gents
> 
> Thanks for the responses - I really was trying to find out if, for any
> hardware or software reason, a usre could no longer access their encrypted
> files, if a user with appropriate privilages could.  Not looking at this in
> the negative, ie to stop it from happening, but from the positive knowing
> that there was a fall back.

No, this isn't possible. root can only access them if the user can I 
believe.

This means you should write down the passphrase used for the mount 
(automatically generated or not), which is different to the account
password, and store that in a safe place. That will allow you to
recover the files if you have the hard drive but you can't log
in or similar.

Thanks,

James