Deleted VM snapshots using the Snapshot manager - Is recovery possible?

[JohnCorkren]

Well I finally get to join the club of users that do not keep up-to-date VM backups.

I was cleaning up a VM by deleting the old snapshots using the Snapshot manager and filed to understand the dialog before clicking yes TWICE.  The VM had 4 snapshots and I started deleting from the oldest snapshot, which had 1 child snapshot, so I clicked the option to delete all the children snapshots.  So I stood there in a daze as I watched the most current snapshot be deleted.

After I destroyed my room I calmly sat down and started to think of how to go about trying to recover for this stupid mistake.  So for starers I ran a utility to show and recovery all the files deleted from that VM's folder but some of the VSDK files seem to be missing.  I've included two files showing the recovered files and what the VM folder looks like now.

Need to know if it's even possible to reconstruct the recovered VMDK files enough to read data or is it a lost cause and I should just move on?

Thanks...

John

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

Nope, move on. When you delete snapshots you commit those changed blocks into the parent disk so it becomes a consolidated view of those changes. Once you've done that, there's no way to "undo" or somehow rewind those blocks and extract them back into a snapshot. Plus, even if you could, the blocks they replaced would still be deleted and so you couldn't recover selected bytes in that fashion.

[JohnCorkren]

That's what I need to to know.

It will take about a week to recompile the data but I would have spent that long trying recover it and failed.

Thanks,

John