How to auto-mount a copied encrypted home

How can I auto-mount and use my encrypted home that I copied to another partition on the same hard disk?

I'm running Ubuntu 11.10. My encrypted home is on sda1. There I've 2 users: userA and userB. Another partition is sda3 on which I have some other Data. BTW, sda1 is formatted as EXT4, sda3 is formatted as EXT3.

I did the following:

I logged out from GUI (Gnome) and changed (using Ctrl+Alt+F1) to the shell. From there I logged in, changed to sudo (using sudo -s) . After then I

created a new mountpoint (tmp) under /mnt (mkdir /mnt/tmp) mounted /dev/sda3 on that mountpoint /mnt/tmp (mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/tmp) copied my encrypted /home to /mnt/tmp using rsync (rsync --acvxASXH --progress --stats /home/ /mnt/tmp/).

After the “copy-procedure” I looked to my “new home” in /mnt/tmp and there I found the following 3 folders:

userA, 
userB,  
.ecryptfs

My structure for /dev/sda3 mounted on /mnt/tmp looks like the following (userB in ecryptfs I've not listed):

┬userA
│
├userB
│   
├.ecryptfs
    │
    ├userA
    │      ├ auto-mount
    │      ├ auto-umount            
    │      ├ Private.mnt
        │      ├ Private.sig
    │      ├  wrapped-passphrase
    │      ├ .wrapped-passphrase.recorded
    │   
    ├ .Private  
             ├ (encrypted file_1)
             ├ (encrypted file_2)
             ├ (encrypted file_n)

Now I would like that this copy of the original home-directory should act with the same behavior as the original home-directory means, that it should be auto-mounted at reboot and give me access to my unencrypted files and after logout all my files should be encrypted again. Any suggestions?

Solution 1:

Looking at what you want to do, I would say use symlinks.

The auto mount I would do with fstab.

this is how I'd do it:-

run sudo blkid to get the UUID of the partition

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.backup Then, edit fstab (with for example sudo nano or gksu gedit) and add this line:

UUID= /media/Media ntfs defaults 0 0 Make sure that the mount location, /media/Media, exists before doing this, then reboot.

Remove all existing symlinks(having backed up all files prior)

rm -rf ~/Videos && ln -s /media/Media/your-folder/Videos ~/Videos Repeat for all the folders you want to appear in your Home directory.

If this is a pain, you could use Ubuntu tweak as this give you a GUI to manage the folder locations. I would make sure the auto mount si setup first though.

Hope this helps.