For a couple of years we used bareos with vmware plugin as our backup system. A few days ago due to an accident we lost our office DC completely. For this case the plugin is capable of restoring virtual machines into local vmdk files. The problem as it seems, it restores them in a kind of monolithic format which neither application nor utility recognizes as a valid VMDK, even though the plugin is using VDDK to create the images. My guess about the monolithic nature of the format is based on HEX dump of the file's header which looks like this:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I tried several methods of fixing the file including vmkfstools cloning, recreating the descriptor file, etc... None worked. Most of the time all tools and applications simply doesn't recognize the file as a virtual disk. For example, vmkfstools reports it as:
The file specified is not a virtual disk (15).
I wonder if anybody could point me at any means of recovering the file.
A funny part of it all is that 7zip did manage to find gpart partitions in the file and currently extracts zfs0.img for me. But I'd prefer to be able to boot normally from the disk.
