Does your windows my documents take up twice as much space

[Isaac]

...when its encrypted?

That's what it does in ubuntu.

I really need help.

I asked for help in the forums and no one seem to know.

Can I delete my /home/.encryptfs file?
It is about to take the legs out from under the only computer I have.

I had no idea that "encrypt home folder" basically cuts your hard drive space in half. That's a bad design and there's no warning about this.

I can't find any information about just "sudo rm -r /home/.encryptfs" I'm trying to figure out why I can't do this.

also my home directory dosen't add up correctly:

All files and hidden files calculate to about 4GB. The total file size is 7GB.

[fliptw]

They shouldn't need a warning, you are Linux user. More saliently you shouldn't use untested stuff on data you want to keep.

[Isaac]

I'm a general computer user, NOT a true linux user. And I don't know what you mean in your second sentence.

[Jeff250]

I've been using ecryptfs for a long time on all of my machines. If you start deleting .ecryptfs files, you'll probably end up with an unintelligible partition of random junk. I also don't understand your methodology. I think you're misinterpreting the numbers. For instance:

Code: Select all

$ du -h .ecryptfs
...
205G	.ecryptfs/
$ du -h jeffrey
...
205G	jeffrey

Note that my laptop's hard drive is only ~300GB, so this disk usage is obviously not independent.

[Isaac]

Eh?? What happens when you do du -sh /home

This is very confusing for me.

[Jeff250]

I would get 410GB. You're just double-counting. You're counting both the encrypted files and the plaintext, but they're the same files. The idea that the plaintext version of your files exist on your hard drive is just an illusion, so you shouldn't count them.

Look at...

Code: Select all

df -h

[Isaac]

df -h is saying my home directory is nearly 13G or 98% of my harddrive, unless I'm reading it wrong:

Code: Select all

$ df -h 
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              15G   13G  323M  98% /
none                  489M  244K  489M   1% /dev
none                  497M  1.5M  495M   1% /dev/shm
none                  497M  460K  496M   1% /var/run
none                  497M     0  497M   0% /var/lock
/home/isaac/.Private   15G   13G  323M  98% /home/isaac

The true contents of my /home/isaac folder is about 6 to 7 GB. These illusions are taking up real space according to df -h.

I can show you the disk usage analyzer. The graph shows isaac and the encryptfs file both taking up space.


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I mean if these were illusions I wouldn't be getting low harddrive space warnings.

I've been trying to delete as much as I can, but clearly encrypting the hard drive causing my 7GB of space to be too much. I think only taking 7GB should be ok on a 15GB harddirve.

[Jeff250]

I would expect the Disk Usage Analyzer to count twice for the same reason that `du' does, but your `df' output shouldn't... what does Nautilus say in the status bar? If you copy a few gigs to your home directory, do you actually run out of space?

[Isaac]

By the way, thanks for the help.

I'll try copying data to test that out after my midterm tomorrow.

As for my status bar it reads 257.3MB free.

[Isaac]

Ok, as per your assignment, I tried copying items to fill up my drive and was blocked with a message saying something like, "YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH HARD DRIVE SPACE!!! STOP IT!"

So I was able to go in and start deleting stuff from my .wine file and other wine prefixes and was able to shrink this exponent to 87% of my hard drive.

So for kids like me, what do we do for our wine stuff? Do I have to create a second account, one that's not encrypted, and install my wine programs there? Is there another place I can install my wine programs, perhaps someplace other than within the home directory?

Off topic: by the way, the keyboard you recommended, really good! I looove this thing. Just to tell you how big a nerd I am, I made a carrying case for it out of a strap and the box it came in. It's pretty sweet.

[snoopy]

Here's my theory:

The creation of the encrypted home folder copied your files, rather than moving them to an encrypted format. Thus, I'd suspect that you have the unencrypted versions of all of your files hanging around still. Try checking those pesky Trash folders... I think the standard location is within ~/.local/

Also, 18G is all the space that you have?!?! I had 18gig about 10 years ago. Now I'm starting to worry about having to watch my usage of the 1 ter that's mapped to /home.

Here's what I'd do: Create a new account, unencrypted, on a new partition. Copy a specific file over to the new account - one that has some size to it, but isn't huge... say 100meg.

Log into the new account, repeat your encryption conversion process, and experiment. If you mess something up, it's on a separate partition... no harm done.

[Jeff250]

Another thing to try is booting into single user mode (a.k.a. Ubuntu's recovery console). If *all* of your files are still visible in /home/foo/, then if you can find some way to disable ecryptfs and delete the .ecryptfs files, you shouldn't have any data loss, since they're already there in the plain. edit: Also, before you boot into single user mode, create some dummy file in your home directory to look for.