Recovering data from a VMware ESXi environment typically falls into three categories: restoring from a backup, manually repairing virtual disk files, or using professional recovery tools for severely corrupted datastores. 1. Restore from Existing Backups
Recovery is a reactive measure; proactive planning is essential for data integrity. First, implementing the "3-2-1" backup rule—three copies of data, on two different media types, with one off-site—is paramount. For ESXi, this means ensuring backups are stored outside the VMFS datastore, ideally on immutable storage that ransomware cannot encrypt.