Data loss in a virtual environment is rarely a single event but rather a failure of layers. Common triggers include: VMFS Recovery™ - DiskInternals
VMFS is a high-performance, clustered file system designed by VMware specifically for storing virtual machine disk images. Unlike standard file systems (like NTFS or APFS), VMFS allows multiple ESXi hosts to read and write to the same storage simultaneously.
After extracting VMDK and VMX files: