Is there a way to recover an overwritten LUKS partition? Consider the following case:
I had a (external) hard drive (not SSD) which is completely LUKS encrypted containing an ext4 file system with some (important) data (in my case images and videos). The passphrase is known. I don't have a LUKS header backup.
Now I accidentally created a new LUKS partition on that drive (which overwrote the old one) and a new ext4 file system inside. Then I copied some new data (in my case the some backup data from my laptop; 160 GB (the external drive has a size of 1TB) to it.
Is there any way to recover the old LUKS partition with all the data or at least the images and videos (maybe without filenames).
Edit: Additional questions
Is there any way to revert bitwise the last operations (i.e. data transfer to the new partition, creation of the ext4 file-system, and creation of the LUKS volume)?
Maybe this reversion is possible on a physical level if one analyzes the magnetic structure of the disk surface? Can a forensic professional do this?
Are there any other promising approaches a forensic professional would try in this case?
As already said I didn't backup the LUKS header of the old volume. However as indicated by frostschutz, if I had opened the old volume before the accident and didn't reboot, the header might be found in the memory (but I did reboot in my case). Are there other places where I can search for the header? I usually mounted the old volume using the pmount tool.