Recovering eCryptfs partition with ecryptfs-recover-private not working

Solution 1:

I figured out my problem. I was running the command and giving it my HOME directory, and for some reason it was saying it was successful in mounting it. However, it was lying. Turns out you need to run the command with the .Private folder that each user has, its located in

sudo ecryptfs-mount-private /home/.ecryptfs/<username>/.Private

The command is supposed to recurse and find that folder for you, but I was impatient and gave it my home folder. I'm not sure why it said it was successful when it clearly wasn't, but if you give it that .Private folder, and then enter your login password, it should mount it to a folder inside /tmp/ and you can do whatever else you want to do with the data =)

Solution 2:

I did an upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04 and my home directory was encrypted. I managed the recover the files after the installation using a modified version of mgrandi's method.

Use:

sudo ecryptfs-recover-private /home/<username>/.Private

It found the wrapped passphrase and prompted for my login password, after providing which it mounted the contents in a /tmp directory where I could see all the files.