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I am encountering this error

Install problem: configuration files for gnome power manager have not been installed correctly

I went to Recovery console and mistakenly deleted .ecryptfs

/home# rm -R .ecryptfs/

When I reboot, I could log in but see a blank desktop. All of my USER settings are gone, also /home directory is empty (save the directory "unmesh" (the user name)) At this point I came to know about the encryption file system and all.

How can I recover my desktop items and other user data without updating to 11.04 ?

guntbert
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Trojosh
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  • Data recovery is likely going to be next to impossible as the data was encrypted. You can try https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery – Panther Jan 10 '12 at 16:27
  • How updating to 11.04 can help you? – Ali Jan 10 '12 at 20:56

2 Answers2

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Sorry to hear about this.

All of your encrypted data was securely stored under the /home/.ecryptfs/ directory structure. You would have had a /home/.ecryptfs/$USER/ directory for each of your users, under which there would be two more directories -- a .ecryptfs/ directory with configuration data about your encrypted mountpoint, and a .Private/ directory with your encrypted files.

If you recorded your randomly generated "mount" passphrase just after installation, you could easily rebuild your configuration data. But your .Private data is gone, unless you have backups.

Jorge Castro
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Dustin Kirkland
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Only way to recover them is to use forsenic tools like testdisk,foremost,sleuthkit checkout this post Is there a way to recover files from a storage device partially overwritten with dd?

Community
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lakshmipathi
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  • Thanks lakshmipathi , I should rephrase my question. I want my desktop to look as it was looking before, along with ALL my application specific settings.e.g. All of my bookmarks of Firefox are gone.. My desktop does not even show menu bar.. :( Is there any way to manually mount "ecryptfs" (though I don't know where to find the passkey for ecryptfs) – Trojosh Jan 11 '12 at 11:56