Hello @ColoradoMarmot ,

Can you please explain which part of my answer is wrong?

By definition an archive is a file that regroupes many files, so a vmdk is considered a special format of archive and please note that archive doesn't mean compression

As for the methode that I proposed, if the vmdk is not encrypted, you can extract the files from it by using 7zip and I have done that many times before and as @RDPetruska said if the user needs just to get back some files form the VM why would they bother if they can just get them back from the extracted files?