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Recovering data from a LUKS partition

tj flag

I’m pretty new to Linux and Ubuntu I don’t know a lot of things maybe some of the basic things but I was wondering if anyone could help or help explain how I could recover data from a LUKS encrypted partition that was deleted it’s on a 2tb hard drive which is cut into multiple partition and the one I’m trying to recover is 467gb in size

First thing I heard people do is clone the drive to help prevent anything bad happening what would be the best tool to use to do that I thought of Clonezilla is that a good option

Second thing is that I stopped using the hard drive immediately after I accidentally deleted it the LUKS partition

Third thing is how should I approach recovering data from this deleted partition

(Sorry if I left anything out I’m on mobile and I don’t know what exactly to put to help you help me)

Any help will be appreciated any at all

Nmath avatar
ng flag
It's unlikely and potentially impossible to recover data since the partition was destroyed and the volume was encrypted. Did you ever make a backup of the partition table and do you know the authentication to decrypt the volume? You can't always prevent something bad from happening, so this is why it's essential to keep backups of important files in multiple locations.
Jeremia avatar
tj flag
I do have some files in a couple of locations but not all unfortunately. I do know the authentication code to access it. no I never did make a backup of the partition table I don’t know why I didn’t. Is there anything that’s worth trying to do to recover anything
Nmath avatar
ng flag
LUKS is designed to be able to quickly and securely wipe by just overwriting the LUKS header. Since the LUKS header would be destroyed when the partition was deleted, if you don't have a backup of the header, it is unfortunately impossible to decrypt the contents and access anything stored there. See: https://askubuntu.com/questions/483584/recover-data-from-formatted-lvm-luks-ext3-after-ubuntu-installed-over-it
Jeremia avatar
tj flag
Thank you for helping
Level9 avatar
cn flag
Normally, If a partition is deleted but not formatted the data could be recovered by simply recreate the partion exactly as it was, without formatting it. This used to work at other OS at least. After a reboot the partition should be recognized again. Use fdisk and exactly the same partition type and no formatting or LUKS-setup whatsoever. Could this be done with LUKS and your complicated setup? Probably not but perhaps worth a try. But backup everything else first if you make misstakes again.
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