Deleted image of running vm

[twister666]

Hello everyone!

By accident I deleted a image of a running vm. The vm folder is empty but my vm been running for past month and a half and no trouble. Now I need to restart the server and worry if I restart will lose the vm. Is there a way to get back the image file or there is no way?

Thanks

 

[udo]

Hello everyone!

By accident I deleted a image of a running vm. The vm folder is empty but my vm been running for past month and a half and no trouble. Now I need to restart the server and worry if I restart will lose the vm. Is there a way to get back the image file or there is no way?

Thanks

Hi,
don't restart or stop the VM!! Then is you disk-file lost.

Linux mark the file as deleted, but since a process have open the file for writing, it's still excist.

Look with lsof to find the file??

Udo

 

[udo]

Hi,
don't restart or stop the VM!! Then is you disk-file lost.

Linux mark the file as deleted, but since a process have open the file for writing, it's still excist.

Look with lsof to find the file??

Udo

Here a short discription. In this case the VM-disk of VM 101 was deleted:

# lsof | grep 101
...
kvm       3649       root   18u      REG              253,2 2147483648     524290  (deleted)/var/lib/vz/images/101/vm-101-disk-1.raw
...

Importand is the pid (3649) and the filediscriptor (18)
do an copy (before that, it's a good idea to stop important services with open files inside the VM, like databases)

cp /proc/3649/fd/18 /var/lib/vz/images/101/vm-101-disk-1.raw.sav

Voila, the disk-file (of an open-VM!) is copied back.

I would test the copied file with an dummy-VM before i shutdown the original VM!

Udo

 

[twister666]

Thank you Udo for very informative answer. I will try tomorrow to restore the image. The more I use proxmox and linux in general the more I like it. And community is very helpful. Thanks again.

 

[JMoreno]

Brilliant!!!

Thank you very much for this thread.

 

[ebiss]

Here a short discription. In this case the VM-disk of VM 101 was deleted:

# lsof | grep 101
...
kvm       3649       root   18u      REG              253,2 2147483648     524290  (deleted)/var/lib/vz/images/101/vm-101-disk-1.raw
...

Importand is the pid (3649) and the filediscriptor (18)
do an copy (before that, it's a good idea to stop important services with open files inside the VM, like databases)

cp /proc/3649/fd/18 /var/lib/vz/images/101/vm-101-disk-1.raw.sav

Voila, the disk-file (of an open-VM!) is copied back.

I would test the copied file with an dummy-VM before i shutdown the original VM!

Udo

Thanks
Very useful

 

[egrueda]

Here a short discription. In this case the VM-disk of VM 101 was deleted:

# lsof | grep 101
...
kvm       3649       root   18u      REG              253,2 2147483648     524290  (deleted)/var/lib/vz/images/101/vm-101-disk-1.raw
...

Importand is the pid (3649) and the filediscriptor (18)
do an copy (before that, it's a good idea to stop important services with open files inside the VM, like databases)

cp /proc/3649/fd/18 /var/lib/vz/images/101/vm-101-disk-1.raw.sav

Voila, the disk-file (of an open-VM!) is copied back.

I would test the copied file with an dummy-VM before i shutdown the original VM!

Udo

Years later, you still saved my day!
Thanks very much!

 

[Chris Stetson]

Question on this post. If the VM is deleted by accident and the VM is stopped is there a way to recover?

 

[dcsapak]

Question on this post. If the VM is deleted by accident and the VM is stopped is there a way to recover?

If you deleted the image of a stopped vm (or stopped it afterwards) AFAIK there is no simple way to recover, best recover from backup

 

[Paspao]

Thank you, stil very useful in 2021.

Still have no idea how 2 KVM disks were deleted.

P.

 

[kid_rock]

Hello.
I just created an account just to write thank you for this very brilliant way to save the .qcow2 file.
Mike