This guide is written for system administrators, data recovery engineers, and VMware administrators who have faced the dreaded situation where deleted VMFS files (VMDKs, VMX, flat files) are not appearing in standard undelete tools, or where the native ls -l or find commands show nothing. 1.1 The Nature of VMFS Deletion VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) is a clustered, proprietary filesystem from VMware. Unlike NTFS or ext4, VMFS does not have a classic “Recycle Bin” or a simple undelete mechanism for files deleted via the datastore browser or CLI ( rm command).
ddrescue /dev/sdX /path/to/image.img /path/to/logfile.log Never run recovery tools directly on the live datastore – writes will happen. 3.1 Check the Hidden .sdd.sf Directory VMFS stores some system files in .sdd.sf (vSphere 5.x/6.x). Deleted files do not go here, but some users mistakenly look inside. vmfs undelete not found
Always treat VMFS as a filesystem with . Protect it with storage snapshots, vSphere Recycle Bin (vSphere 8+), or third-party backup solutions. Without those, a “not found” error is permanent data loss. This guide was last updated for vSphere 7.0, 8.0, and VMFS6. For VMFS5, similar principles apply but some carving tools may work better. This guide is written for system administrators, data
grep -a -b -P 'KDMV' /path/to/image.img > vmdk_headers.txt grep -a -b -P 'COWD' /path/to/image.img >> vmdk_headers.txt For each offset, extract a candidate VMDK: ddrescue /dev/sdX /path/to/image