Comment 53 for bug 870326

I've waited for a week since my last update on this bug to ensure that I have resolved the situation.

I was starting to experience serious corruption after repeatedly deleting zero-length files per my comment #37. They kept cropping up with each new reboot. If I spent more than an hour or so in Ubuntu my .xsession-errors file would grow so large I'd run out of disk space!

I also continued to experience this bug with various kernels including then-current natty (2.6.38-11) and then-current oneiric (3.0.0-12). I could not get the mainline 3.0.6 kernel to boot without oops so could not test that.

Anyway, I ended up deciding to stay out of my ubuntu partition, considering every boot resulted in new corruption (e.g. gnome-terminal profile settings gone, wireless secrets were forgotten even though they remained listed in seahorse).

Steps I took to fix this:

1) Booted into Arch linux (separate partition) and mounted the ecryptfs partition (my ubuntu ~/) to a new mountpoint. Info on how to do this can be found in the ubuntu wiki for ecryptfs here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedPrivateDirectory

2) Tar/copy all files/folders from my old ecryptfs-encrypted /home to a temporary unencrypted folder. Best to use tar for this so you get all the dot-files.

3) Deleted all files/folders from the encrypted directory. This also deletes all the encrypted copies under /home/.cryptfs/$USER/.Private which is the point of this exercise.

4) Un-tar/copy all files/folders back from unencrypted temporary folder to the ecryptfs folder, thus forcing them all to be re-encrypted.

I've not had the slightest hint of this issue reappear (about 5 days now). I've since upgraded the kernel to 3.0.0-13.21 and continue to be trouble-free. Hope this works for others too.