if I encrypt my home partition using Mint 11 and some time in the future I decide to install another linux distro will I lose access to my home partition????

Hello,

It depends on how you decide to encrypt it. How exactly are you going about this? Are you planning on using TrueCrypt, encfs, LUKS, etc?

Cheers,

Josh

I don't know which method Mint uses. During the installation there is only a checkbox to enable encrypting on the home folder.

If Mint uses LUKS, will the new distro detect this encrypted partition/folder and prompt me for the passphrase to open this partition/folder. Or do I need to do any prior backups before installing any new distro.

btw, /home is on it's own partition if this helps.

If it is mint, it should prompt you for the password and all that jazz. Being on it's own partition definitely helps. Just make sure that if you do decide to go with a different distro, custom edit the partitioning within the setup so it doesn't delete your pre-existing encrypted partition.

@ corp769

So, as long as I keep my encrypted partition intact, other distros will detect this and just prompt me for the passphrase. Am I correct about this?

I appreciate all the help you gave me

The more modern ones should. If you use an older distro, it might not prompt you for a password, but will see it. Now, is this a complete seperate partition, or is it within an LVM?

separate. It's a primary partition

no lvm, no raid nor a logical partition

Are you going to encrypt your backups as well? If you encrypt your home directory but have plain text backups, well obviously the encryption is pointless.

If you have encrypted backups and you decide to install some other distro, you can presumably copy the data from the backup to your new encrypted home, for example. Or you can get the new distro to read your encrypted home directory, if the new distro can run the same encryption software as your current distro.

Thanks to all who reply.

I solved it. If I want to install a new distro and have my /dev/mapper/home load and mount automatically, I just need to open my luks partition i.e cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda4 home before running the distro's installation program. But do not mount it. The installation program will do that for you.

The installation program will detect the mapped device in the partitioning section. I just needed to add the /dev/mapper/home to the file system, but NOT format it. I formatted the other partitions for boot and /

Note: Also, DO NOT FORMAT the device where luks resides. In my example, luks is on /dev/sda4

Lastly, I rebooted and was prompted for my passphrase for sda4

I went into my /home folder and I saw my files and folders were still intact. So, as long as you keep a separate partition for luks and not format it, everything will be great.