According to a recent report, 40% of the industries succumb to precious data from virtual environments each year, and around two-thirds of them can’t locate a resolution about retrieving data from virtual disk in the case of a failure. Accidental deletion, formatting and file system exploitation are the main reasons that cause data loss. But, as almost all pre-eminent virtual system software doesn’t provide a built-in recovery function, it makes virtual machine data recovery considerably challenging for users.

As you know back up of the prime data has become the most essential part of the day to day life, missing any part of it can cause a disaster to one’s business or personal life. This post chew over the topic of what is a virtual machine? why it has become an extensive way of storing or creating a back up of data. If data get deleted from the virtual machine then how to recover deleted files from a virtual machine.

What is Virtual Machine?

Virtual Machine is system software that provides the functionality of a physical hard disk by creating images of data stored with it.. As this emulation technologies become a lot powerful and reasonable, virtual machines (VMs) became a way more viable answer for business and power users. Virtual Machine is able to run on multiple OS, means on Windows machine you can easily run other OS like Linux, Mac, etc. Ease for users to store data(Backup) but there may be a lot of reasons due to which you can delete your some important files or file gets deleted from the virtual machine. “This approach enables developers to test software on different operating systems without the cost of installing a second hard disk or partitioning a single hard disk into multiple volumes or drives. There is the ability to directly modify a virtual machine’s hard disk from a host server that supports many applications, including moving files between the virtual machine.

Reasons and Errors Messages After File Corruption

While virtual machines have a variety of advantages over mechanical machines, VMs share some key vulnerabilities with physical hosts. That includes the potential for file system corruption and information loss due to viruses or malware attacks, sudden shutdown of the system, hardware or system malfunctions, system corruption, etc. And, when your virtual file gets wicked there is an error message whenever you want to access your file for example ‘The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable’ or ‘Inaccessible file format’.

”Are you using a Virtual machine hosted on WINDOWS which helps you to do repetitious system distributions for sustaining backup and have deleted your very valuable files by either misfortune or virus attack or any different reason of data loss and have no hint how to recover deleted files from a virtual machine?”

Is it feasible to recover deleted files from virtual machine?

It is considered that removed files are revived from the drive before dropped files get overwritten. The Virtual Machine stores files within the same order as hard drives. The operating system holds track of files stored on the hard drive via the file system, or specifically pointers. Every file has a pointer notifying system wherever it’s located. When the user eliminates a file from a virtual machine, the operating system deletes file data from pointer and marks sectors occupied by the file as available. In the pointer read of Windows, the file is not any longer accessible for reading or write actions, because it is has been deleted. However, in fact, the deleted file is still retrievable before new information overwrites sectors containing deleted information.

Method to Recover deleted files from the virtual machine:

Yes, there is a manual way of recovering the corrupt files from VMs not recover your deleted files but only in the case of VHD or VHDX files. One of the tricks that I know is that you can create a new Virtual Machine, add the corrupt Virtual disk file to it and then compact it. If you don’t know how to do this, follow the steps given below:

  • Generate a new Virtual Server, and add a new hard drive.
  • Now open Settings, and choose the hard disk you have created earlier. Then browse the location of the VHD file that will not load.
  • Hit the Virtual Disk Wizard, and choose the compact option. 'Convert it to a fixed-size virtual hard disk option that must be selected.
Important Note: If the VHD file is 50 GB in size but actually it contains only 10 GB of data, then the new VHD file will only be compacted to 10 GB.
  • Here you can save this VHD file with a new name (optional).
  • When the VHD file is successfully compressed, copy the VHD file back to the original server and try to mount it.


Nowadays, situations like lost and corrupt of the file have become very common but every non-computer user should know the way out of it. And because of that, I thought to discuss this situation. This post discussed all formats of virtual machines, in what situation the file gets deleted or corrupt and how to recover the deleted or corrupted files from Virtual Machine that is file format can be of any type either VHDX, VHD, VMDK or VDI. I hope this post is helpful to you.


Safe Milli


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