Data loss from servers, hypervisors, and virtual machines can be daunting. With 35+ years of data recovery experience and 15 years of virtual machine data recovery experience, Ontrack has recovered data from virtualised systems for thousands of enterprise customers worldwide.

Virtualisation adds complexity to the data recovery process and when you need data recovered from virtualised environments, Ontrack is here to help.

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Because virtualised systems comprise a unique marriage of software and hardware components, the successful recovery of inaccessible or lost data requires superior knowledge of hypervisors, host servers, storage devices, RAID arrays, file structures, applications, and more.

Ontrack's global team 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. Ontrack virtual machine data recovery experts can help with following: Ontrack virtual machine data recovery experts can help with following:

Virtual Machine Data Recovery Expert

Our engineers can handle every VM data loss scenario in virtualised systems.

Whether it's a single virtual machine or an entire virtualised environment on enterprise storage, we can handle it all.

Our recovery capabilities are extensive - 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's reputation as the global leader in the data recovery industry.

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.

  • Failed disks or damaged RAIDs
  • Deleted LUNs/Volumes
  • Formatted or overwritten hosts, datastores, volumes and VMs
  • Corrupt Datastores or host volumes (VMFS, NTFS, ReFS, EXT, XFS, etc)
  • Corrupted virtual disk files (VMDK, VHD, VHDX, etc)
  • Corrupted guest file systems
  • Deleted VMs or snapshots
  • Deleted files from within a VM
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VM 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.

  • Stop using the system.  The more you use it, the more likely recoverable data will be overwritten.
  • 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 virtual disk 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.

Our data recovery process.

Contact our specialists for a free consultation immediately if you’ve experienced data loss on a virtualised system. Time is critical, and the probability for a successful data recovery is higher when no previous attempts have been performed. Decades of experience confirm that this is critical for saving your valuable data.

 

In lab services

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 opened 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 virtual machine recovery due to the speed of the recovery process. It is the fastest way to access and recover your data. Virtual machine 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 system is not allowed to be shipped and security protocols do not allow for a remote data recovery, onsite service is the best option for your data recovery. Our technician will travel to your facility to perform the data recovery at your location.

Virtual System Case Studies

Ontrack Provides Database and Backup Restores After a Flood

Feb 20, 2020

The situation

Dell Equallogic™, Storage Area Network, VMware ESX base and RAID 10 backup server.

A flash flood in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany in Spring 2016 permeated the walls of a server room in a hobby and art supplies store, severely affecting the IT system.

Vast amounts of water flooded into the server room affecting two Dell devices: an EqualLogic SAN with 96 hard drives and a RAID 10 backup server with 12 hard drives.

The storage capacity of the SAN hard drives was between 300 and 700 gigabytes and the backup server contained 24 terabytes of data. About 30 terabytes of data were lost when the SAN volume and the iSCSI connections for the SAN in a VMware ESX Server were damaged. Due to the importance of the data and that most of it contained critical customer information, an emergency recovery was arranged with Ontrack. Several SAN virtualized LUNs running in a VMware environment were prioritized as critical information, with one of them storing a particularly important Oracle database that needed to be recovered as soon as possible. The client also needed to recover two additional LUNs with important data, as well as all the data on the backup server.

The solution

After working with the client to assess the data loss and prioritize the data that needed recovering, it was determined that the hard drives in both systems needed to be processed simultaneously. All the hard drives were picked up by Ontrack and delivered to the data recovery lab in Boblingen, Germany.

Upon arrival, the hard drives were initially processed in a cleanroom environment to safely remove dirt and inspect the full extent of the damage. The data on each hard drive and its server location were also documented at this time.

Fortunately, the drives in the SAN had no mechanical problems and could be read properly. However, some of the drives from the backup server were faulty and these had to be processed further in the cleanroom in order to extract copies of the data.

The SAN data recovery was very complex, as the water damage interrupted the connection to the VMware ESX Server and the power supply while in operation. This meant that the mapping links to the EqualLogic SAN and the LUNs in the VMFS datastores (as well as the Oracle database and other files) were heavily corrupted.

To perform the recovery, Ontrack’s proprietary data recovery software tools were required to reconstruct the system and the file structures in order to get to the actual files. However, reassembling the Dell backup server was relatively easy since it hardly experienced any data corruption.

The resolution

The engineers from Ontrack’s Boblingen data recovery lab succeeded in reconstructing the main points of both affected devices so that the data could be accessed again, including the critical Oracle database and the full backup.

Overall, the customer was very satisfied with the work of the recovery experts from Ontrack. The recovery efforts were also mediated by the Dell Support Team so the data could be restored into a new storage system, as the information required was urgent and needed as soon as the recovery was complete.

Virtual Machine Data Recovery FAQs

Can you recover data from VMware Storage Snapshot backups or virtual machines infected by malware?

What is the best way to backup a Virtual Machine?

Can you recover corrupted virtual machine files from a server?

What are the most common virtual machine data loss problems?

Our virtual machine performance has degraded. Does this indicate a serious issue?

Can Ontrack recover corrupted virtual machines from a server?

How do you recover data from a virtual environment?

What tools are available to recover data from a virtual environment?

What options do I have to recover data from a virtual environment?

Service levels and pricing.

Custom quotes are provided for complex jobs to meet our customers’ requirements. Estimates for evaluations and recovery can vary depending on customer urgency, device type, capacity, number of files, and complexity of the data loss situation.

Standard

10 business days

Priority

Average of 3 business days

Emergency

Average of 12-24 hours

Our initial consultation is always free. We work closely with our customers to provide an overview of our recommended course of action, the outlook for success, timing, and costs involved. Customers are never charged until they approve a documented path forward for their data recovery job.

Join over a half million people and businesses who have trusted Ontrack to recover their data.

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Start your data recovery now with a free evaluation.

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.

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  • The free evaluation will be completed by KLDiscovery Ontrack Ltd (trading as Ontrack), Nexus, 25 Farringdon Street, London EC4A 4AB.
  • You authorise Ontrack to begin the evaluation immediately. During the free evaluation, you can cancel at any time. Full details for cancellation and your rights are set out in our Terms and Conditions. In order to cancel, please email or call Ontrack using the contact details provided or use the model cancellation form on our website.
  • If you choose to cancel the evaluation or decide not to proceed with the recovery after the evaluation, and would like your device returned, we will ship back to you for £20.00 (inc. VAT) for UK mainland shipping (next day service). Other delivery costs may vary. If you choose to go ahead and we cannot recover your data, we will return your device free of charge. Alternatively, we can securely destroy your media.

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