ALL snaphots lost but files exist

[luconsta]

Hello Everyone,

Using my VMWare Workstation 10 with one of my virtual machine, I was not paying attention that my storage will run out of disk space.

So when the VM was shut down because the lack of the disk space I thought that deleting one of the intermediary snapshot of that VM will free some space but ALL of the snapshots dissapeared from the Snapshot Manager.

Is there a way to make them appear again in the Snapshot Manager to properly delete some of them.

If more information is needed for recovery, just let me know.

Kind Regards,

Lucian

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Community,

there's a .vmsd file in the VM's folder which keeps track of the snapshots, and which the Snapshot Manager uses to display the snapshots. Do you have a backup of this file?

Please remember that deleting a snapshot will merge the data from the selected snapshot's .vmdk file into its parent snapshot's (or base disk's) .vmdk file, which - depending on the data in the snapshot - may require additional temporary disk space. Please make sure you have sufficient disk space available. How much disk space you need depends on several factors, e.g. the snapshot .vmdk's file size that you want to delete, its parent .vmdk file's size, and the VM's provisioned size. If there's not sufficient free disk sapce, deletion will fail and the .vmsd file may be reset/wiped.

André

[sadiq1435]

down voteaccepted

Do you have a backup? It's entirely feasible that you can back up the data from inside the Virtual Machine, or the vmdk image itself, and the config of the VM host platform. Restore that, and you'd probably restore the system state to before you deleted it. If you can see the vmdk image itself, and you know that it's the one you deleted, perhaps can you get a VM to mount that directly by just adding it as another disk?

[luconsta]

Thank you a.p. for your answer.

Unfortunately I didn't have a copy of the VMSD file and this one was the "broken file" - it has lost the previous snapshots.

On the other hand was an relatively easy to edit file and having the VMDK files I could recreate the structure and recover my initial state of the VM.

So thank you and also I would like to thank also to sadiq1435 for the answer and now I think I would backup regurarly at least the VMSD files 😉

Kind regards,

Lucian