VMware Data Recovery works with entire virtual machines, backing them up and restoring them in their entirety. These backup and restore operations are conducted using a backup appliance which stores the virtual machines to a location called the deduplication store. The virtual machines that are backed up are stored in a form that can be read by solutions such as Data Recovery, but the contents of these virtual machine backups are not otherwise easily readable. For example, the contents of the virtual machine backups in the deduplication store are not readable by users browsing through files using their operating system. There is no convenient mount point that can be used by operating systems like Windows to read the contents of these backups. Users may want to restore a previous version of a single file. Perhaps the file has been deleted or information from a previous version is required. In such a case, users can restore an entire previous version of the virtual machine that contained the file, but this may be cumbersome. Rolling back to previous versions may overwrite the existing virtual machine and even if the restored virtual machine is restored to an alternate location, the process may not be as fast as customers want. FLR addresses these issues by providing a way to access individual files within a restore point. With this access, you can choose to read copies of the files or restore them from within restore points to any other available location. For example, you could create two copies of the file in question to compare them, or you could overwrite an existing file with an older version contained within the restore point, thereby reverting to a previous version. Note that accessing these files only provides a way to read their contents. You cannot write to files that are made available in restore points through FLR.

VMware takes a bigger step into the backup and restore market for virtual machines with the latest release of VMware Data Recovery 1.1 (VDR)

VMware administrators may be interested and happy to know that VMware is finally offering a product to help with the burden of virtual machine backup and restore. The product is called VMware Data Recovery (VDR), and while it isn't exactly brand-new, VMware did recently update it to version 1.1, though without much fanfare.

Much like physical machines, there is a tremendous need out there to back up virtual machines. If a mission-critical virtual machine has a problem, you need a quick way to get it back up and running. Remember, virtual doesn't mean "problem-free."

While many people believe that VMware had already introduced a backup application prior to VDR, that just isn't the case. VMware did introduce VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), and despite its name, it doesn't actually back up and restore anything. Instead, what it does is provide others with a mechanism to access the VMFS file system in order to back up and restore virtual machines. With VCB, administrators were able to either create custom scripts to perform backups or leverage third-party backup software from VMware partners.

How to recover deleted vmdk vdi vhd files

If you deleted VMware (.vmdk), ORACLE (.vdi), and Microsoft (.vhd) virtual image files, you can use virtual machine data recovery freeware to undelete those vmware files. The virtual machine data recovery software can recover lost files from virtual machine.

• Recover all deleted Office Documents, Image and Multimedia Files, Database Files from virtual machines
• Restore all data from virtual machines lost due to formatting and file system corruption
• Supports easy recovery from FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, exFAT file, and NTFS file systems based virtual drives

To recover lost deleted formatted virtual machine files from Windows computer, you need to download a virtual machine data recovery freeware. You may download virtual machine data recovery software for free from: here

The Vmware data recovery software free can undelete files from virtual machine on Windows 8/7/XP/Vista 32/64 bit hard drive, include IDE and SATA hard disk, Hitachi, Western Digital WD, Seagate, Samsung hard drive. The Vmware data recovery software is also able to unformat HDD and restore lost photos jpg jpeg png gif tif tiff bmp and raw image data, videos (MP4, AVI, 3GP, AVCHD, H264, MPG, MPEG, MOV, WMV, ASF, VOB, M2TS, etc), and music (MP3, WMA, OGG, M4A) files. The Vmware file recovery software can retrieve back any lost files from Windows computer such as HP EliteBook, Lenovo ThinkPad, Asus Transformer Book T100, Acer, Samsung, Sony Vaio, Dell, Toshiba Kira Ultrabook and Qosimo, Fujisu, Panasonic, etc.

Steps to recover deleted files from virtual machine

Step 1. Install and run Vmware data recovery software asoftech data recovery and then in Asoftech Data Recovery, select drive where vmware files are deleted, then press "Next" to start scanning drive for lost files.

I was thinking about the first topic in the blog then thought about VDR since its very important to select a suitable back solution for your environment. I am not saying that VDR is the best :) but its one of the good solutions based on the scale of your environment.

VDR is composed of three components:

1. Virtual Appliance (VA) which is managing the backup and restore process
2. User interface plugin for vCenter to manage VDR
3. Deduplication destination storage

Component of backup job:

1. VMs to be backed up
2. Schedule to run the backup
3. Retention policy

How Backup Works ??

1. Once a new job is created in vCenter using VDR plugin, the job will be submitted to VDR VA
2. Up on schedule trigger, VA will create a snapshot for the current state of the target VM
3. All new IOs for the target VM are submitted to delta.vmdk-. Also, the base vmdk- will be unlocked.
4. VDR VA will mount the based vmdk and will start copying the contents to its local vmdk which is called the deduplication destination storage.
5. The VA will apply deduplication technologies to the data stream before dumping it to deduplication storage.
6. Once the backup is completed, VA will unmount the base vmdk and lock it back to the targeted VM
7. VDR VA will consolidate the changes of delta.vmdk to the base vmdk and will delete the snapshot.
8. On the next schedule of the job, VDR VA will follow the steps from the same steps expect for step 4. When VDR VA mount the base vmdk, it will use Changed Block Technology (CBT) to copy the changed blocks ONLY in base vmdk to deduplication storage instead of full vmdk contents.
9. Those changed blocks will be combined with the latest backup in order to have a final full backup of the VM in VDR deduplication storage.