How to Recover Deleted Files from Virtual Machine in an Easy Way?

Everyone, at some point in their lives, has experienced the loss of their crucial data. However, losing any part of the data may severely affect the whole business or someone’s personal life. Therefore, backing up the prime data has now become the most important part of their day-to-day life. To back, up their important data, users use any type of storage device, such as a hard disk, pen drive, virtual machine, etc., but the most widely used are the virtual machines.

In the worst scenario, if data gets deleted from the virtual machine, then the question arises of how to recover lost data from virtual machines. Thus, this post will let you know what exactly a virtual machine is and how to restore deleted files from virtual machine.

Overview of  Virtual Machine

A virtual machine is a type of software that provides its users with the functionality of a physical hard drive. It creates images of the data stored with it or imitates a dedicated hard drive in the system. A user can easily use this virtual machine on multiple operating systems, i.e. Windows machine or any other operating system like Linux, Mac, etc. However, it becomes more convenient for a user to store data (backup). But there are some situations or reasons why a user may accidentally delete some important files or files from the virtual machine and how a user can easily restore deleted files from virtual machine hard drive is discussed in the following segments.

Why Data Lose from Virtual Machine?

Virtual machines have a variety of benefits when compared with physical machines but it also have some vulnerabilities. All these vulnerabilities lead to file system corruption and information loss because of:

• The sudden shutdown of the system,
• Virus attacks,
• System or hardware malfunctions,
• System corruption, etc.

Moreover, when the file gets corrupted, it displays an error message every time a user tries to access these files, such as ‘Inaccessible file format’ or ‘The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable’. But there is a way to restore deleted data from a virtual machine by performing easy steps below.

Techniques to Recover Deleted Files from Virtual Machine

One can restore deleted files from virtual machine hard drive before the files are overwritten. The virtual machine maintains files in the same method as hard drives. In addition, the operating system maintains the record of files stored on the hard drive via the file system or specifically using pointers.

When a user deletes a file from a virtual machine, the operating system deletes file data from the pointer and marks that sector occupied by the file as accessible. However, there are full chances that one can easily retrieve deleted files before new information overwrites the sectors containing deleted information.

Manual Apporach to Recover Lost Data from Virtual Machines

One can easily recover deleted data files from virtual machine manually. To do the same, follow the steps mentioned below:

1. First of all, a user needs to create a new Virtual Server and add a new hard disk
2. Now click on the Settings option, and choose the newly created hard disk. Then, Browse to the VHD file
3. After that, click the Virtual Disk Wizard, and click on the Compact option. Please ensure the “Convert it to a fixed-size virtual hard disk” option is checked
Note: If the original size of the VHD is 40 GB but, contains only 10 GB of data, then the new VHD file is compacted to 10 GB only.
4. Now, a user can save this VHD file as a new one with a new name, which is optional

As the VHD file is compacted successfully, one can copy the VHD file back to the original server and try to mount it.

Recover Deleted Files from Virtual Machine with Web Console

If users have set up the VM (virtual machine) with VMWare, they may use the web console to restore small files and folders without any need for a Virtual server agent to be installed on their location VM. However, there are some requirements:

1. For Windows, the VM should have the NTFS file system
2. The path of the virtual machine should be powered on
3. If the VM is a part of the same vCenter as the original VM, then data recovery is possible.
4. The latest editions of VM tools should be installed on your PC.
5. Users may also use open-vm-tools on guest virtual machines compatible with Linux releases.

Now, if your PC fulfills all these needs, login to the web console by following the below steps:

• 1. Log in to the Web Console:
  2. Hit on my data >VMs > my virtual machines.
  3. Any VM, that is archived, will be noticeable with the archive icon

Restore Data from Virtual Machine with Your Computer

1. Go to computers, and hit on VM to open the virtual machine.
2. Now choose files > restore files
3. Enter an entry in the name column to increase the volume and folder structure
4. Users may choose one or more files and hit on restore.
5. Next, follow the on-screen instructions and complete the procedure to restore files.

Recover Deleted Files from Virtual Machine Using Trusted Solution

In order to have an easy, simple, less patient, and more affordable way to retrieve deleted files from a virtual machine,. Users can go for a trusted third-party solution, i.e., Hyper-V Recovery Software. Free download this application on any version of Windows OS.

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Prominent Features of This Application

• Recover complete VHD or VHDX file data.
• Provides preview of all items along with attributes.
• Option to save the scan report for the data partition.
• Offers different VHD file scanning modes.
• Save recovered VHD file data with meta properties.
• Advanced search option within recovered VHD file.

Working Steps to Restore Deleted Data from Virtual Machine

• Download and install the software on your PC.
• After that, browse the VHD or VHDX file, choose the damaged files and click open.
• Then, preview all the restored data in the application panel.
• Save recovered files VHD or VHDX data at the desired location.

Additional Information Blog: If you want to recover lost or deleted files from hard drive you can use this Computer Data Recovery Software

Conclusion

Corruption and the loss of files have now become very common problems. Hence, after understanding the reason for virtual machine file corruption, we have discussed various techniques to recover deleted files from virtual machines. So, a user can easily choose one of the three methods discussed above to restore deleted data from the virtual hard drive. To overcome the challenges faced by users during the manual procedure, professional software has been suggested. It can also be treated as a one-stop solution to recover deleted data files from virtual machines.