dd if=/vmfs/devices/disks/naa.600... of=/vmfs/volumes/NAS_Recovery/Vault-recovered-flat.vmdk bs=1M conv=noerror,sync

"No," I said, pulling up the dashboard showing the green "Healthy" status. "It's back."

as an existing hard disk. Boot in safe mode and run chkdsk (Windows) or fsck (Linux).

If the large -flat.vmdk file is missing from the datastore browser, standard VMware tools cannot bring it back. You must act quickly to prevent the physical storage blocks from being overwritten.

Accompanying the missing file was a ticket submitted three minutes prior by an intern named Kevin. The subject line read: “Accidentally named the VMDK wrong, tried to fix it. Sorry.”