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I installed 11.10 on my laptop choosing to encrypt home directory.

Now, when I use disk usage analyzer I get this picture:


Total fs capacity is reported correctly as 40.1GB. However inside home directory I have mysterious feature of .ecryptfs which appears to have the same size as my home directory.

What exactly does that mean?

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1 Answer 1

up vote 3 down vote accepted

.ecryptfs is a special folder where the system stores the encrypted home folder data.

That data is mounted on each user's home directory, so you can see it decrypted and use it comfortably. Since you're the only user on your system, you see that folder has the same size as your home folder.

The mounting process is what makes it appear duplicated. Read more here:



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Thanks. Does .ecryptfs take the physical space on my HD then? That would mean that I will slice capacity of my drive in half by running it encrypted basically? :/ –  radek Oct 21 '11 at 1:18
Nop, you only "see" that space twice. The only real space being consumed is at .ecryptfs. Your home dir is not really storing anything. Thx for the vote! –  nandinga Oct 21 '11 at 9:41

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