recover data inside the deleted VMware VMDK file?

[radius]

To Support,

Is recover data inside the deleted VMware VMDK file a support feature of ZAR?
I notice from trialing ZAR, that it is able to see data inside the deleted VMware VMDK file, however result of recovering those data file is corrupted.


Reference of recover data inside the deleted VMware VMDK from another user:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/67742

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Recovery of the files which are/were inside of the deleted VMDK file is considered an undesired side effect. The files coming from inside the VMDK file will be corrupt in all cases.

If you need the files that were inside the VMDK, you need to recover the VMDK file itself first. When the file is recovered, load it as a disk image and have ZAR analyze it. Alternatively, you can run ZAR from within the VMware virtual machine (although this is slower than "native" execution).

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Although the reference you specify indicates somebody actually recovered the data from inside the VMDK, this is not a typical result. These guys were exceptionally lucky in that the VMDK file was not fragmented, and the "outer" (host) volume contained very limited number of files. This most likely caused ZAR to mistake the VMDK for the "outer" (host) volume.