Migrating From Linux Mint to Debian with Encrypted Home


Debian has long been attracting me, so I finally decided to replace Linux Mint Maya running on my good old Acer laptop with Debian Wheezy. However, a problem stumbled the migration process: my home directory was encrypted.

Unlike Ubuntu or Linux Maya, the encryption support was not built in the Debian installation process, so this has somewhat made me worry. Losing your data just because you cannot unlock them anymore would be silly 😀

Fortunately, adding encryption support after installation finishes is simple. All we need is creating a regular user using the same username and password as the one we use in Mint upon install.

Install required packages

After the installation complete, just log in as root and install ecryptfs:

# install ecryptfs-utils

Then add the ecryptfs module into Linux kernel:

# modprobe ecryptfs

Done! Now we can log in as a regular user and access our encrypted data.


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