VMFS Recovery

Recovers data from ESX server

Change log for VMFS Recovery™




Minor update VMFS Recovery™ 4.21.1


  • Several features from the previous update were not added, now its' fixed
  • Minor bugfixing


Minor update VMFS Recovery™ 4.20.2


  • Added support of QEMU virtual disks
  • Improved file system detection
  • Improoved detection of damaged XFS recovery module
  • Bugfixing and stability improvement across all supported file systems


Major update VMFS Recovery™ 4.18.3


  • Significantly improved stability of SSH(actually it's SFTP) connection
  • Added keep-alive and auto-reconnect features to all SSH connections
  • Fixed empty folders bug on FTP connections
  • Logic improvement and memory optimization improved the speed of the VMFS recovery scan
  • Optimized search and storage of VMFS inodes. The result is less RAM usage
  • Speed up the scan of EXT volumes
  • Bugfixing and stability improvements


Major update VMFS Recovery™ 4.17.3


  • Improved file recovery in EXT analyzer mode.
  • Fixed several errors in EFS forms: when a user enters a password and the key files are missing, they need to be added, and then decrypted again, repeating in a loop.
  • Optimized LVM reading: less reading during program startup, more during opening of the volume. This sped up the program start and slightly reduced memory usage.
  • Fixed several quite severe bugs in Preview. It used to crash due to multithreading.
  • Reworked AddressBar functionality in the main window (for file products).
  • Addressed Symlink functionality for APFS, ZFS.
  • Added a check for occupied drive letters by network drives in Mount2System.
  • Added the ability to connect via IPv6 when connecting through SSH.
  • In "expert" display mode, added more tree-like structures to understand what is located on each element (for example, when there's a GPT disk with an LVM partition containing thin clients (virtual machines), and each virtual machine has its own MBR and file system inside it), example shown in the image below.
  • Updated disk list tree-like structure to display dependencies between disks, volumes and virtual machines and their partitions

  • Transitioned even more from ANSI to Unicode.


Minor update VMFS Recovery™ 4.16.4


  • Updated set of signatures in RAID reconstruction module
  • Minor bug fixing.


Minor update VMFS Recovery™ 4.16.3


  • Updated set of signatures in RAID reconstruction module
  • Updated digital certificate


New release VMFS Recovery™ 4.16.2


  • Fresh and new security certificate
  • Bug fixing and improvements in EXT recovery module
  • Bug fixing and improvements in BtrFS recovery module
  • Bug fixing and improvements in NTFS recovery module
  • Bug fixing and improvements in EFS recovery module
  • Bug fixing and updated set of signatures in RAID reconstruction module


New release VMFS Recovery™ 4.14.9


  • Improved recovery from very large VMFS volumes stored on ESX/ESXi JBOD volumes.
  • Minor bug fixing update
  • Added new RAID signatures for automatic array detection


New relase VMFS Recovery™ 4.14.8


  • Minor bugfixing update
  • Fixed preview of "x3f" files
  • Updated Open Folder dialogs to match latest Win11 style


New relase VMFS Recovery™ 4.14.6


  • Minor bugfixing update


New relase VMFS Recovery™ 4.12.2


  • New recovery algorithm for deleted VMDK files on VMFS volumes. Works for thick provisioned VMDK files with NTFS and EXT guest file system inside.
  • New RAID structures added
  • Major bugfixing update


New relase VMFS Recovery™ 4.10.1.3


  • Added BtrFS support. A B-trees file system, a perspective file system used by Linux OS, gains a lot of recongnition from manufacturers of NAS devices.
  • Windows 11 compatible
  • Minor but important changes in the intertface and software logic
  • Improvements in EXT, ZFS, NTFS and VMFS recovery modules
  • Minor bugfixing


Major bugfix VMFS Recovery™ 4.9.3.5


  • Fixed SSH connection issue. Before VMFS Recovery 4.9.3.5 we have used older SSH connection library that was supported password authentication only. It caused the error code 10058 whaen an SSH connection was established. Current version uses latest SSH implementation and SSH error 10058 issue is fixed.


Minor bugfix and improvement VMFS Recovery™ 4.9.3.1


  • Improved performance in very large lists of folder tree
  • Fixed issue when displayed folder contents with over million files


Critical bug fix of VMFS Recovery™ 4.9.1.3


  • Division by zero error fixed in RAID Wizard


Minor update of VMFS Recovery™ 4.9.1.2


  • Added sector size recognition. Disk images with sector size that doesn't match to the storage media are detected and read correctly.
  • Updated a Power Search engine, scan speed improved, duplicate data is sorted and removed
  • Improved scan quality on NTFS and ReFS disks
  • Fixed minor issues in EXT and VMFS modules
  • XFS recovery module improved significantly. Scaning executed faster, duplicate results in Power Search folder are sorted and removed


Minor update of VMFS Recovery™ 4.8.1.5


  • Added reading data from LVM snapshots
  • Minor bug fixing in VMFS, EXT, and FAT recovery modes
  • RAM allocation reduced for EXT and FAT recovery modes.
  • Optimized memory usage during export of recovered data
  • Fixed an issue with empty data when a disk is mounted to system.


Minor update of VMFS Recovery™ 4.8.0.2


  • Minor bugfixing
  • EXT improvements to reduce RAM allocation.
  • Bugfixes that affects EXT, RAID detection and reconstruction and NTFS.


Major update of VMFS Recovery™ 4.7.6.2


  • "Recovered Files" virtual folder with Power Search results is renamed to "Recovered by Signatures". This should minimize confusion when users considered that their recovered data should be inside "Recovered Files".
  • Deduplication update added a new compression algorithms and latest versions of Microsoft deduplication features. Affects NTFS and ReFS file systems.
  • EXT improvements to reduce RAM allocation, speed up Full Recovery->EXT scan and scan speed improvements.
  • Scan cache feature is redisigned.
  • Bugfixes that affects EXT, StorageSpaces, XFS, symlinks, NTFS and RAID 1E.
  • Added a few features in a built-in -dd command
  • Added recognition of F2FS volumes. F2FS cannot be opened, only detected.
  • Fixed crash during update on the old Windows versions.


Minor update of VMFS Recovery™ 4.7.4.7


  • Corrected detection of *.mid file?type in Power Search which previously could cause an access violation.
  • Fixed division by zero in Power Search on FAT32 disks in Uneraser mode.
  • Fixed division by zero on undefined drives.
  • Fixed an Export issue that caused an access violation in ADS.
  • Removed option "Backup Metadata" when a disk is opened. It caused a misunderstanding with the scan cache.
  • Removed a message "Waiting for Preview" when Power Search is running.
  • Fixed initialization NTFS and ReFS for Power Search.
  • Fixed detection of JBOD configurations.
  • Fixed backward compatibility in RAID Wizard for Windows XP and Windows 2003.


Minor update with bugfixing of VMFS Recovery™ 4.7.09



Major update of VMFS Recovery™ 4.7.08


  • Completely new NTFS and ReFS Recovery engine, build and tested for recovery of large scale storages. Now it's able to detect and correctly sort physical or RAID disks with deleted NTFS or ReFS partitions that were stored lots of virtual machines with guest Windows disks. Earlier such NTFS over NTFS were recovered only in cases with correct partition table.

  • Automated update check. A lot of customers asked to add a check for update. Developers have added it. Update checks if installed version is up to date, determines if new version is compatible with product key and warns if new release is beyond free upgrade period. Of course update can be turned on or off anytime you like.

  • Updates in VMFS
  • Updates in EXT
  • Updates in XFS
  • Extended logs by calculating RAID 5 XOR checksum.


Major update of VMFS Recovery™ 4.6.12



It's an accumulated update that has got improvements and development since last 3 months.

  • Added support of APFS, encrypted APFS, ROMFS.
  • Improved LDM and Storage Spaces arrays reconstruction
  • Many tweaks and fixes in NTFS and EXT file system
  • Improved LVM disks and arrays detection
  • Minor fixes and tweaks in ZFS and XFS
  • Accumulated improvements for RAID detection
  • 30x speed up open of folders with large number of files inside. For folders with more than 100.000 files
  • Fixed issue with license, when a compressed disk required deduplication license
  • Lots of minor bug fixing


VMFS Recovery™ 4.5.67 update



  • Fixed a bug that caused crash during preview. Considered to be medium severity. Update is recommend for those who had experienced this issue.


VMFS Recovery™ 4.5.65 update



  • Fixed critical bug. VMFS Recovery™ experienced a failure when a disk or flash drive was extracted from the system during recovery process. Links to data scanned for other drives became corrupt even if extracted disk was not involved in recovery process.
    We strongly recommend to update.


New release of VMFS Recovery™ 4.5.34



  • Contains minor fixes and improvements.


VMFS Recovery™ 4.5.29.11 is available to download:



  • Contains a lot of critical fixes that was tracked and fixed with previous released our new bug track and report module.
  • EXT fixes and improvement
  • XFS fixes including corrupt large file error (Files over 512Mb saved as corrupt)


New release of VMFS Recovery™ 4.5.5.7 is available to download:



  • Added a LVM hybrid RAID support, where disks may have different size. Used in Linux OS and on NAS devices.
  • Added module to track anonymous usage statistics and bug reports. Details
  • Lots of minor bug fixing and stability improvement thanks for a new bug tracking module


  • VMFS Recovery™ 4.5.1.2 is available on site:



    • Extended support of detectable HP RAID 6 arrays up to 22 drives.
    • A lot of changes in detection of LVM arrays. Extended detection range and capabilities.
    • Fast detect algorithm in RAID Wizard improved in speed and quality of detection. We do our best to minimize brute force enumeration.
    • RAID initialization at startup received a set of new signatures and capabilities. Even more reconstructed RAID arrays right after start up!
    • RAID Wizard checks selected configuration by user and extended range of disks in a set, adding +1, +2 and deducting -1 disks in array. We have discovered that many customers select existing number of disks instead of original, when one (two) of the drives fails. Setting applied for RAID 5 and RAID 6 arrays correspondingly. Deducting a disk from the set could be required if customer adds a spare disk to the set. Which is also not required, but happens.
    • New signatures from Dell arrays are added to recognition. We have discovered new Dell RAID mapping at one of the remote recovery cases. It's somewhat similar to HP RAID 5R, which is similar to RAID 5, but uses its own structure and array signatures. We do not support these new Dell's arrays yet, but now we can recognize them.
    • Added support for a new group descriptor in VMFS 6
    • Fixed minor issue with VMFS 6 disks over 16Tb capacity
    • Added NTFS, ReFS and VMFS deduplication support for Pro and Ultimate licenses.
    • Added support for cluster sizes up to 2MB in NTFS disks.
    • Improved speed of scan and processing of large number of folders and files on EXT disks. Previous version has opened folder that contains several million files in Reader mode: 18 hours, new version opens it in 30 minutes. Uneraser scan improved from 2 hours to 30 sec on test cases.
    • Interface texts updated to ensure in proper and safer guidance during data recovery processes.
    • Added "Drives -> Create Images for All Storages", an advanced disk image creation tool. It allows creating disk images from multiple drives with specified offset and size from beginning or end of the disk. A more detailed guide for this new feature will be released soon.
    • Added detection of China's Dahua file system
    • Added several GUI hints, warnings and descriptions to ease usage of VMFS Recovery™
    • Installation script updated
    • Added support of large blocks (64+ kb) in NTFS
    • Added a workaround for latest Ubuntu and CentOS EXT4 disks where huge file flag (EXT4_HUGE_FILE_FL) isn't used anymore. Caused to display files larger 2Gb as files less than 2Gb
    • Bug Fixed: incorrect file operations on VMFS 6 disks that led to display and save healthy VMDK files as corrupt ones. Because of the severity of this bug we strongly recommend to update.


    VMFS Recovery™ 4.4.2 is available on site:


    • All executable and binary libraries used in VMFS Recovery™ was digitally signed
    • Mount to system feature was updated
    • VMFS inodes detection improved
    • EFS structures are searched when disk was opened in EFS mode only.
    • Added support of 8kb blocks in LVM
    • Added load of external MFT in Uneraser mode for NTFS disks
    • Faster search through scanned EXT4 and VMFS records
    • DG values limited in EXT file systems
    • Added GUID identificators in GPT for vSAN, Virsto disks
    • Added support for *.mxf, *.avp and *.avb file types for Power Search
    • EXT scan limited in depth for Extent & Indirect to avoid endless scans
    • Additional checks for EXT (Inode) records (DG by crc for ubuntu17/18)
    • Additional disk size check and notification.
      When disk larger than 2Tb is installed to USB rack that has controller limited to 2Tb.
    • EXT2 and 3 are turned off by default because of large number of false detects on EXT4 disks.
      Can be turned back if needed in the INI settings file.
    • Maximum number of file fragments was limited in EXT2 and 3 file systems to 1000000 (Editable in FSM.ini)
    • Added ability to mount multiple volumes in the OS, usable for iSCSI
    • Fixed: minor built-in preview issues
    • Fixed: Search !00 now works as it should in HEX-preview
    • Fixed: reading LVM Thin Provisioned disks after detection in RAID Wizard
    • Fixed: Reconstructed RAID disks were not marked red.
    • Fixed: Access Violation during NTFS scan


    VMFS Recovery™ 4.3.6 is available on site:


    • VMFS Recovery™ installation file was digitally signed
    • Added ReFS Recovery mode
    • LVM RAID detection improved
    • Fixed bug: EXT scan error
    • Fixed bug: NTFS scan error
    • Fixed bug: start up error


    VMFS Recovery™ 4.2.8 is available on site:


    • Fixed bug: Software minimized to the task bar and not responded to the inputs
    • Fixed bug: Detecting LVM configuration in RAID Wizard resulted in Access Violation operation
    • Fixed bug: EXT file system was hidden in a open disk wizard and unavailable to scan( mostly a RAID Recovery issue).


    VMFS Recovery™ 4.1.3 is available on site:


    • Added Hikvision file system support. A bespoke file system used to store data from Hikvision video surveillance solutions
    • Minor fixes and improvements for VMFS SeSparse format
    • Minor improvements for compressed VMDK files on VMFS 5 and VMFS6. Increased read speed of *.OVF files
    • "Scan freeze" bug fixed.
    • Added a new cbfs driver. Older one will became obsolete soon and will be no longer supported. Please note: we strongly recommend to execute deinstallation procedure of older version of VMFS Recovery™ before updating on a new version, as only this this way driver will be properly updated
    • Preview of video files received update. Video codecs were updated and extended.
    • RAW photo preview has got support of new RAW types and camera's support.
    • Fixed bug that displayed incorrect estimated time during export, like: "Estimated time left 65532:65487:65535"


    VMFS Recovery™ 4.1.1 is available on site:


    • Added DiskInternals EFS Recovery features and now VMFS Recovery™ can read and recover data from Bitlocker disks. Bitlocker version 1 and 2 are supported.
    • VMFS Recovery™ can read and recover data from EFS disks. Supports all versions of EFS


    Beta version of VMFS Recovery™ 4.1.0 is available on request:


    • We've added long waiting SESparse support
    • added support for compressed VMDK files


    Released VMFS Recovery™ 4.0.1:


    • +15-30% gain in scan speed on single drives due to a new scan engine
    • Asynchronous reading multiplies RAID disk speed almost corresponding to the number of disks in array
    • VMFS module has got more than 100 tweaks for specific scenarios of lost data
    • Added a number of new RAID signatures
    • New NTFS Recovery module
    • Minor improvements in EXT module
    • Added XFS 2.0 support
    • Improvements and bugfixes in ZFS and RAID-Z


    Released VMFS Recovery™ 3.3.0.28:


    • Minor improvement of VMFS file system
    • Major update to NTFS Recovery and Uneraser modes. Scan and save speeds gain +30%
    • Major update to ReFS Recovery added support ReFS 2.0
    • Saving of recovered data improved because optimisation of list of recovered files. Large amounts of recovered files (more than a million of files) are processed up to 2 times faster


    Released VMFS Recovery™ 3.3.2:




    Released VMFS Recovery™ 3.3.1:


    • Automated recovery of RAID 6 improved. Minor detection issues solved.
    • Added non-standard MFT size on NTFS disks.
    • Fixed vmdk snapshots issue.


    Released VMFS Recovery™ 3.2.3:


    • New version has improved speed and stability.


    Released VMFS Recovery™ 3.2.2:


    • We are proud to introduce full VMFS 6 support that works in all modes and fully supports new VMFS journal. This new version of VMFS file system was introduced in ESX server since version 5.5.


    Released VMFS Recovery™ 3.2.1.9:


    • Added VMFS 6 support
    • EXT files system module has a lot of improvements and bugfixes
    • Mount Disk Image" command failed to access multi-RAID disks like LSI RAID 5 + VMFS JBOD + LVM


    Released VMFS Recovery™ 3.1.0.20



    Developer version of VMFS Recovery™ 3.1.0.10 available on request:


    • Added Microsoft Storage Spaces support.
    • Added a new feature that has all the Linux's "DD" command features. Please find description of it's usage here.


    On-site stable version of VMFS Recovery™ 3.1:


    • Added ZFS reader and RAID-Z support
    • VMFS can establish network connection to any SSH server (earlier only ESX was available)
    • Automatically detected disks are shown at RAID Wizard
    • EXT3/EXT4 large files error fixed. (Large files were displayed as 0 bytes and were unreadable)
    • Unrecognized JPEG and PDF files can be renamed automatically by using internal tags such as date, author, owner, etc