Please Help - Deleted VMDK accidentially

mnichols1202

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Sep 9, 2018
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I'm a dead man walking. I had 2 similar vmdks of 3tb, deleted the wrong one. Family Photos, ect. of course.
No back up but i was sure i had snapshots turned on in the freenas. Nope of course not. (corrected that since).

Fortunately? that vm was the only vm on a mirrored set of 4TB hard drives.
Discovered mistake within 30 seconds. and pulled drives from freenasNAS. (shut it down first)

so i have 2 drives that were/are a zfs volume. iSCSI target to my vmware 6.7 server. VMDK in question was possibly thin provisioned.

Can someone suggest a data recovery company that would be able to deal with this mess? I'm in way over my head. (obviously)


Mike
 

Chris Moore

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I'm a dead man walking.
You have heard the saying that goes, 'if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all"?
I would still like to say I am sorry you have had this misfortune.

For next time, I would suggest storing your important documents directly on ZFS instead of inside a VMDK.
 

danb35

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I believe it's possible to roll a pool back to an earlier state, but I have no familiarity with how. However, I'd recommend exporting the pool immediately in order to preserve its state.
 

blueether

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Redcoat

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HoneyBadger

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iXsystems
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I think this is where the kids say "oof."

The first step here is to acquire two more 4TB HDDs, because you will want to boot onto a system with your current two drives unmounted, and clone the entirety of the disks at the bit-level using something like dd that will just blindly grab every bit and plop it on the new targets.

Your best bet without spending exorbitant amounts of money is to look at this from the VMFS level rather than ZFS. Are you 100% sure you deleted the entire VMDK flat file and not just the pointer? If you have only removed the pointer and the vmdk-flat file is still there, there is a VM KB that can assist with recreating the missing pointer. Failing that, you can contact a data recovery service like OnTrack (no affiliation, just pulling results from a quick search) and exploring if they will quote/assess for free. Remember; you haven't destroyed a ZFS object, but rather a VMFS object on top of ZFS.

But step zero should be "clone the drives at the bit level and only ever work on a copy"
 

blueether

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But step zero should be "clone the drives at the bit level and only ever work on a copy"
Yes, that IS the best way to do data recovery
 
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