Natty reinstall saving encrypted home

[Alan Pope]

On 26 July 2011 02:01, Jordon Bedwell <jordon at envygeeks.com> wrote:
> Choose manual partitioning when Ubiquity loads up, clear everything but
> your home partition and the installer will do the rest.  If you don't
> have a seperate home partition then well, you're going to need to make
> it it's own partition:

You do not need a separate home partition in order to reinstall and
keep the contents of your home directory. In Ubiquity if you choose
manual partition and just make sure you _don't_ tick 'Format' on the
partition containing / (and by implication /home) then it will wipe
everything _except_ /home/* out and thus you'll keep your home data.

However I have never tested this with an ecrytfs home directory, so
don't know if there is some metadata (like your passphrase) held
elsewhere. I suspect you'll need to know the passphrase to 'unlock'
your home directory.

However after looking at
<https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedPrivateDirectory#Recovering
Your Mount Passphrase> it seems the metadata is in
/home/username/.ecryptfs so would be retained in this scenario.

Al.