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Comment by rookiemistakes | Hacker News Reader

Last week, actually. Was a bit careless and inebriated while working on a demo and suddenly I realized I had luksFormatted the luks partition holding the only copy of keys for cryptocurrency worth ~$200k. That was a sizable fraction if my supposed net worth. Either I'm still in denial or I've risen above obsessive materialism as it doesn't affect me too much so far, though. Its just money.

Unplugged the drive and haven't touched it since but I'm not holding my hopes up.

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If it makes you feel better I lost the keys to Bitcoin worth a few orders of magnitude more.

Life does go on.

Same here, lost the keys to a sizeable wallet that was god knows how big at one point, I stopped checking a while ago but it was a good exercise in letting go and learning to value other things. I can't complain, most of my regrets are related to how I spent or wasted money, there's worse things and life went on to turn out great regardless of my net worth.

It bothers my ex much more than it does me. She has contacted me on at least five separate occasions asking me if I had reconsidered my decision to not search for the old desktop the wallet resided on.

Given the value, I would suggest paying for a professional recovery service.

The thought has struck me (and the reason why I yanked and kept it offline) but no idea how to tell which company is worth approaching...

Depending on how you did it, the data could still be recoverable.

cryptsetup luksFormat on sdx3 with default parameters over an existing partition with (I think) the same parameters but a different passphrase. Realized my mistake shortly after typing "YES" and I don't think further writes happened since.

Like mentioned in other comment, I'd def shell out a portion of the money to recover the rest but not sure where to start. Given the amount I'm hesitant to do any further operations myself with the drive (Samsung evo SSD) plugged in.

I'm not in a position to advise, but I'd try a few recovery firms- given the context, they should be able to provide realistic estimates on what's possible. Even if it's 10% of whatever is inside if you are successful.