Recovery should always be a last resort. To minimize the risk of VMFS data loss, administrators should implement a robust 3-2-1 backup strategy (three copies of data, two different media, one offsite). Additionally, using RAID 6 or RAID 10 provides better fault tolerance than RAID 5, and enabling "Termination Protection" on cloud-based or software-defined storage can prevent accidental deletions.
Before attempting any recovery, follow these rules to prevent permanent data loss: vmfs data recovery
If the data is critical (e.g., hospital records, financial databases), stop your own attempts and contact a professional lab with VMware expertise. However, for most sysadmins, the tools above will bring your missing VMDKs back to life. Recovery should always be a last resort
However, if the snapshot has been consolidated or deleted, the data resides in the slack space of the main VMDK file. Recovery specialists must mount the VMDK as a secondary disk on a helper VM, bypassing the active operating system to run forensic tools like TestDisk or PhotoRec against the virtual disk block device. Before attempting any recovery, follow these rules to
Imagine walking into your data center (or logging into vCenter) only to find that a VMFS datastore has crashed, been accidentally formatted, or is showing as "Not Mounted." For any vSphere administrator, this is a worst-case scenario. VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) is proprietary to VMware, and standard file recovery tools often fail against its complex metadata structures.