This may seem like an odd question, as if I should know, but I will try to explain my situation:

I used Photorec to recover files off of my hard drive. I'm not sure if the details of the state of the hard drive are relevant yet, as in I may or may not have written over some files, but I can say that I have recovered many files, with a bunch of .ecryptfs files. I do not have access to the .private (not exactly sure what this is) extension, but I believe that I have the 32 character hex passphrase. I followed this guide, specifically the paragraph "Recovering Your Data Manually", although I set the plaintext passthrough option to yes, as this seemed to be the only way to read and work with the files, and I set the filename encryption option to no. After mounting this way, my syslog has no errors, and the files show up in the mounted directory. Upon inspection (ls -la) I find that the seemingly decrypted files are smaller than the encrypted ones, which I believe to be a positive, as if something did indeed happen. The problem is that when I go to view the files in a text editor, they look to still be encrypted?! I found a forum post that seemed to have a similar problem here, but I have yet to find a solution for reading the files, or making any determination about them, and the first thing I would like to know is if I have even successfully decrypted them.

I guess the only clues I have for anything happening are the fact that I receive no errors in performing the mount, and that the files are smaller. Before trying to find a solution toward accessing, working with, or viewing the files, I'd like to know if they are even decrypted. Do these clues say something to this effect? Either way, what do they say? Apologies if I have left out relevant information.