Whole Virtual Machines Folder Missing

[waragainstsleep]

This has happened to a customer I support. Has anyone else seen their entire Virtual Machines folder just disappear from their drive for any reason?

Just had a single XP Pro VM in it but the parent folder is gone too. Customer would not have deleted is. Certainly not without knowing it.

[WoodyZ]

I've seen Users delete or move all sorts of files and folders they shouldn't have and don't remember doing it so sorry, nothing personal, however I put no weight in your assurance that the client didn't do it.

Did you check to see if it was moved elsewhere vs being deleted by the user or unexplained gremlins?

What methods did you use to see whether or not it was on the Macintosh HD?

[waragainstsleep]

Nothing terribly clever. I just checked where the folder should be in Finder, then checked the available/used space on the drive to see if it had somehow become invisible. Also checked the trash but its not anywhere.

While there are plenty of customers I would consider capable of doing this by accident and most of them would deny it afterwards, this one is not one of them. He knows better than to delete things he doesn't know about and more than likely he understands what this folder is for anyway.

[WoodyZ]

IIRC I read somewhere, maybe here in the VMware Fusion Community Forum, that a particular AntiVirus program deleted a Virtual Machine but not the Virtual Machines folder in ~/Documents.

Anyway it doesn't matter whether or not the User did anything as thats not going to resolve the issue and you'll just have to restore the Virtual Machine from the regular and ongoing Backup you've implemented.  (You have provided for this in your support of a Client haven't you?)

In a Terminal you can use the mdfind command to see what pieces, if any, of the Virtual Machine exist.  The following are examples of what to look for.

mdfind .vmwarevm
mdfind .vmdk

You can also take a look at the hard drive from a graphical perspective using programs like Disk Inventory X or GrandPerspective and since Virtual Machines tend to be larger then most files, if it still exists, then it should stand out.