The Problem

Assume that your computer does not want to start any more (e.g. because of a kernel panic during boot or a corrupted file system), and you want to make a last backup of your /home directory ... well - this us usually not a big deal if your home directory is not encrypted.

BUT: If it is encrypted, then things tend to get complicated, because you can not easily access the files within the encrypted directory.

Here is my approach how to deal with such things.

The Solution

Fortunately there is a cool tool which is able to mount your encrypted home partition in one single step: ecryptfs

So the steps to recover your data should be the following:

1. Boot with a live CD (in my case: Ubuntu mate 17.04d / i386)
2. Mount a harddisk which is big enough to store your files (in my case: /media/ubuntu-mate/backup)
3. Mount the encrypted home drive (read-only)
4. Copy all the files to the backup disk

And here is what it looks like in the terminal:

The first part shows the usage of ecryptfs, and the second one utilizes rsync to copy the (now) encrypted data to the backup disk.