Recover deleted VMware virtual disks, i.e. *.vmdk files

data-recoveryvmware-esx

We had a virtual-disk and its snapshots at the following path on a server.

/vmfs/volumes/ESX3/IBSng_Server/

The *.vmdk files were:

IBSng_server.vmdk 
IBSng_server-flat.vmdk
IBSng_server-000001.vmdk
IBSng_server-000001-delta.vmdk
IBSng_server-000002.vmdk
IBSng_server-000002-delta.vmdk
IBSng_server-000003.vmdk
IBSng_server-000003-delta.vmdk
IBSng_server-000004.vmdk
IBSng_server-000004-delta.vmdk

When server was down, we accidently removed some of the *.vmdk files, shown below:

IBSng_server-000002.vmdk
IBSng_server-000002-delta.vmdk
IBSng_server-000003.vmdk
IBSng_server-000003-delta.vmdk

Now the server doesn't come up. We tried the trial version of DiskInternals VMFS Recovery software, but looks like the software is good at recovering the contents inside the vitual disk, not recovering the *.vmdk files themselves. I wonder if anybody can help. Thanks.

Best Answer

As stated above, you can not recover the delete files - they are gone. You had to redeploy the virtual machine and restore from backup.

However, as it appears you deleted the snapshot deltas only, if the base disk (represented by the IBSng_server.vmdk and IBSng_server-flat.vmdk) is intact, you can reboot the machine attaching the original IBSng_server.vmdk file.

This should be sufficient to restart the machine, but with stale data obviously. At this point, you can restore your backupped data on the now-running machine. With this approach you can reduce the time your machine is offline by skipping OS reinstallation.

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