topic Recovering accidental deleted VM's in ESX4.0 in ESXi Discussions

Recovering accidental deleted VM's in ESX4.0

stripling20 — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:51:40 GMT

Hi,

I accidently deleted a VM (centos) in ESX-4.0 and was not able to recover the data on the same. Could any one please help on this.

ESX server was configured with RAID-1 (DISK MIRRORING) which is a local disk but no backup utility was used/configured.

Troubleshooting steps tried:

I tried rescaning the Datastore and VMFS but no luck;

Created new VM with custom mode to use existing vmdk file to see if the deleted file present on Datastore, again no luch

I remember few file names which resides in deleted VM, By anychance is it possible to recover those files, atleast.

Regards,

Rajesh R

9740099933

Re: Recovering accidental deleted VM's in ESX4.0

schepp — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:59:09 GMT

Hi and welcome to the communities,

If you clicked "remove from inventory" in the vSphere client, your VM will still be on the Datastore and is just not shown on the ESXi host.

If you clicked "delete from disk", you are out of luck. There is no undelete in VMFS and if you didn't do a backup, the files are gone.

Regards

Re: Recovering accidental deleted VM's in ESX4.0

stripling20 — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:05:45 GMT

Thanks for your reply Tim.

Yes, I did "delete from disk". So VM folder got deleted from the Datastore and hence no flat file available to recover rest of the files

Trying for my luck if anybody has a magic code to recover it :smileycool:

Re: Recovering accidental deleted VM's in ESX4.0

virtualinstall — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:03:42 GMT

In the abcense of any backups I wonder if a data recovery tool would help? I have not used anything like this for VMFS but something like this http://www.diskinternals.com/vmfs-recovery/

Re: Recovering accidental deleted VM's in ESX4.0

stripling20 — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:32:52 GMT

Thanks for the info. unfortunately trail version din't help, trying to get the full version or let me know if you have the registration key :smileysilly: