"Boot failure," I thought. "The geometry is wrong."
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. recover deleted flat vmdk file
Recovering a deleted file is a critical task, as this file contains the actual raw data of your virtual machine. While the smaller .vmdk descriptor file can be easily recreated, losing the -flat.vmdk is more serious. "Boot failure," I thought
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. Recovering a deleted file is a critical task,
With the volume safe from further writes, I remounted it as Read-Only. Now came the hard part.
I initiated a backup of the recovered VM immediately.
