topic Re: Snapshots deleted after failed restore in VMware Solutions Discussions

Snapshots deleted after failed restore

NAVYMOTO6 — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:54:45 GMT

Hey everyone,

We lost one of our VMs and were conducting a restore through SMVI. It crashed at about 60%. We tried to restart the restore and were supprised to find that the last 15 days of backups had dissapeared. The server contained the file share for our orginization. Is there any way to get the snapshots back?

Re: Snapshots deleted after failed restore

peter_lehmann — Wed, 18 May 2011 11:35:39 GMT

Hey

Sorry for the bad news, but deleted SnapShots are deleted...

If you have snapshots enabled on the Agrregate, then you can restore the whole volume (incl. SnapShots) from the aggr-snaps.

CAREFULL! This restores ALL volumes within the aggregate, so this one must be a VERY IMPORTANT volume to do this to all the other volumes...

Hope this answers your question.

Peter

P.S. Yet another good reason to use the NetApp Controller also as CIFS Server...

Re: Snapshots deleted after failed restore

NAVYMOTO6 — Fri, 20 May 2011 06:59:02 GMT

Thanks for the reply Peter,

We changed the snap autodelete settings to prevent it from happening again. About 60% of the vmdk that was being restored had completed. When trying to attach it to another server, it says the drive is unformatted. Is there any way to get any of the data out of it?

Re: Snapshots deleted after failed restore

peter_lehmann — Fri, 20 May 2011 08:51:08 GMT

If you got only 60% of the VMDK back, I do not know of a way to get this "drive" back in a readable way.

Maybe some of the VMware Experts have any idea?

Peter

Re: Snapshots deleted after failed restore

michael_schlicht — Fri, 20 May 2011 14:32:52 GMT

Hoi Peter,

maybe you can check if UFS Explorer can recover any data out of the vmdk file.

Cheers

Michael

Re: Snapshots deleted after failed restore

peter_lehmann — Fri, 20 May 2011 16:07:48 GMT

Hi Michi

Thanks for the Tipp, this is an excellent idea.

Actually after a little googling around I stumbled upon this blog:

http://blogs.netapp.com/storage_nuts_n_bolts/2008/07/file-level-reco.html

Hope this helps to get some of the data back. Let us know navymoto6, pelase.

Peter

Re: Snapshots deleted after failed restore

NAVYMOTO6 — Sun, 22 May 2011 04:52:44 GMT

Michael and Peter,

UFS Explorer worked better than we expected. It recovered 70Gb more of the data than the size of the .VMDK. Thanks for the help!

Ryan