Move encrypted home folder to new PC

[Patrick Asselman]

Judging from their own statement, the encryption is not username 
dependent:

eCryptfs is a POSIX-compliant enterprise cryptographic stacked 
filesystem for Linux. eCryptfs stores cryptographic metadata in the 
header of each file, so that encrypted files can be copied between 
hosts; the file will be decrypted with the proper key in the Linux 
kernel keyring. There is no need to keep track of any additional 
information aside from what is already in the encrypted file itself. You 
may think of eCryptfs as a sort of "gnupg as a filesystem".

And this seems to concur:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/124174/how-do-i-move-my-encrypted-home-to-a-new-computer

So all you need to do is create the user and chown all the encrypted 
files, while the user is not logged in.


Best regards,
Patrick


On 2014-10-22 11:52, Colin Law wrote:
> I am moving to a new PC after the lightning induced demise of my old
> one.  I have installed Ubuntu 14.10 and restored /home from the old
> PC, and all is well, except that one of the users has an encrypted
> home folder.  /home/user and home/.ecryptfs/user have been restored 
> ok
> but now I somehow need to setup a new user to access the encrypted
> data.  I have the mount password.  Is there any way of doing this
> other than manually recovering the data and copying to a new user?
>
> Colin