Data loss from servers, hypervisors, and virtual machines can be daunting. With over 30 years of data recovery experience, Ontrack Australia has recovered data from virtualised systems for thousands of enterprise customers worldwide.
Although virtualisation adds complexity to the data recovery process, Ontrack Australia can help.
As virtualised systems require both software and hardware components, the successful data recovery of inaccessible or lost data requires advanced knowledge of hypervisors, host machines, storage devices, RAID arrays, file structures, applications, and more.
Ontrack Australia has years of experience and training, a host of proprietary tools, and specialised knowledge gained through unique working relationships with virtual machine software vendors and hardware OEMs that recommend our services. We can help with following;
- VMware ESX and vSAN (VMDK files)
- Microsoft Hyper-V (VHD, VHDX, and AVHDX files)
- Citrix Xen
- Oracle VM
- KVM

Our engineers can handle every data loss scenario in virtualised systems including:
- Failed disks or damaged RAIDs
- Formatted or overwritten hosts and VMs
- Deleted VMs or snapshots
- Deleted files from within a VM
- Corrupt Datastores or host volumes (VMFS, NTFS, ReFS, EXT, XFS, etc)
- Deleted snapshots
We can recover data from a single virtual machine or an entire virtualised environment on enterprise storage.
Our recovery capabilities are nearly unlimited, whether it is software corruption, device failure, or accidental deletion. Through unique capabilities, years of experience, and hundreds of thousands of successful data recoveries have established Ontrack Australia's reputation as the industry leader in data recovery from virtual machines.
Common causes of data loss on virtual storage devices.
There are many causes of data loss. Fortunately, Ontrack has expertise to recover data from the following situations and more.
Examples of what we can recover:
- Re-formatted VMware ‘Datastore’
- Corrupted virtual disk files (VMDK)
- Corrupt VMFS Datastore volumes
- Deleted virtual disk files (VMDK)
- Deleted snapshots
- Traditional RAID and hardware failures
- VMware vSphere
- vSAN
- Virtual Volumes (VVols)
- Fusion for Mac
- Workstation Pro
- Corrupted file systems


Virtualised system data recovery recommendations.
For best results, Ontrack recommends you follow these guidelines to protect you from further data loss. These recommendations can help preserve your chances for successful data recovery with Ontrack.
- Never install data recovery software onto a volume if you require deleted data to be recovered. Installing software, creating, or copying files to the volume can permanently overwrite data in the free space of the volume and make it unrecoverable.
- If critical data is inaccessible due to accidental deletion, device failure, or corruption, take the volume offline and unmount it immediately.
- If you choose to attempt data recovery on your own, always work with a backup copy or image file of your data, volume, or VMDK file.
- Re-initialising or reformatting a problematic volume will remove all data and complicate data recovery attempts.
- Only rebuild a RAID array if all of its member drives have been completely imaged, or you have a fully functional and verified backup.
- Never attempt to force a failed RAID member drive online unless you have all member drives imaged.
Data recovery options
Contact our specialists for a consultation if you’ve experienced data loss on the virtualised system.
Time can be critical, and the odds for successful data recovery are higher when no previous attempts have been performed. Decades of experience confirm that this is critical for saving your valuable data.
Cleanroom
Our advanced cleanroom facilities increase the amount of data which can be recovered from damaged media. We perform any data recovery where the media needs to be uncased in our secure cleanroom environment to avoid further contamination and recover the maximum amount of data possible.
Remote Data Recovery
Remote Data Recovery (RDR) is the best option for cloud recovery due to the speed of the recovery process. It is the fastest was to access and recover your data. This cloud recovery is completed via a secure internet connection using proprietary tools. This method is not only quick, but cost-effective as well.
Onsite Services
If your data is too sensitive to leave your location, or you want to outsource the service, we can help. We provide secure data destruction on site for any type of device. We can also dispose of the media for you and provide an erasure report for audit and compliance.

Virtual machine data recovery FAQs
Service levels
Complex jobs are customised—including timelines, to meet our customers’ requirements. Estimates for evaluations and recovery can vary depending on customer urgency, device type, capacity, number of files, transfer speeds, and complexity of the data loss situation.
Standard
Average of 7-10 business daysPriority
Average of 2-3 business daysEmergency
24/7 until completionThey don't call us the world leader for nothing. Join over a half million people and businesses who have trusted Ontrack to recover their data.
Start your data recovery now with a free consultation.
Contact our team of experts. Ontrack accommodates everyone – from the largest government or enterprise organisation to an individual who may have lost their digital photos and everyone in between.