Recover Deleted Flat Vmdk File -

The problem with flat VMDKs is that they are not sparse; they are monolithic slabs of data. When you delete a 2 TB file, the file system (VMFS) simply marks those blocks as available. Every second the ESXi host remained running, it risked overwriting those blocks with swap files, logs, or other VM activity.

SSH into the ESXi host. Run:

Shut down the ESXi host, do not touch anything, and hire a professional data recovery service that specializes in VMware VMFS (e.g., Gillware, Ontrack, Fields Data Recovery). Expect to pay $1,500–$5,000. recover deleted flat vmdk file

With the volume safe from further writes, I remounted it as Read-Only. Now came the hard part. The problem with flat VMDKs is that they

I couldn't restore the file to the original datastore—it was read-only, and I didn't want to risk corruption. I provisioned a massive 2.5 TB LUN on our backup NAS and mounted it to the ESXi host via NFS. SSH into the ESXi host