As hardware virtualization and software emulation technologies become more powerful and affordable, virtual machines (VMs) have become a much more viable solution for business and power users. While virtual machines have a number of advantages over physical machines, VMs share a few key vulnerabilities with physical hosts. This includes the potential for file system corruption and data loss.

Fortunately, the same powerful data recovery tools that work for physical machines can also be used to recover data from virtual machines. In this article, we'll look at several virtual machine data recovery methods using R-Studio. This tutorial shows the steps performed in VirtualBox, but any virtualization software will also work.

But before we begin, we need to clarify some license issues:

• If you want to install R-Studio on several virtual machines, you need to obtain a license for every R-Studio installation. In this case, every virtual machine is treated the same way as a physical one. You can run all R-Studios simultaneously to use them according to their license terms stated in their EULAs.
• If you want to serve all your instances of virtual machines running on a single server, you need to install one copy of R-Studio on the server and thus obtain one license. In this case, you'll need to stop a certain virtual machine instance and use the methods below to recover data from that virtual machine.

Method 1: Data Recovery from Virtual Machines with Virtual Disks that are Supported by R-Studio (all licenses)
Starting from version 9.3.191223 (Windows), 7.3.191246 (Mac), and 5.3.191246 (Linux), R-Studio supports almost all disk image formats native for most popular virtual machines (Microsoft's Hyper-V: VHD/VHDX, VMWare's Workstation/Player: VMDK, Oracle's VirtualBox: VDI, etc). R-Studio may load them as images

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and process them like real physical disks.

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Additionally, you may read more on the processing of VHD/VHDX disks in our article Data Recovery from Virtual Hard Disk (VHD/VHDX) Files.

R-Studio Corporate and Technician/T80+ can also create such images (VHD/VHDX, VMDK, and VDI).

Method 2: Data Recovery from Virtual Machines with virtual disks that are not supported by R-Studio (all licenses)
A virtual disk file with such severe damage that neither its native software nor R-Studio can open it. R-Studio can load them as byte-by-byte images.

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and process them accordingly. R-Studio can scan them.

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Select a recognized partition and enumerate the files on it.

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Alternative methods that can be used in R-Studio versions that don't support virtual disk image formats.

Each method is tailored to a different type of R-Studio license: R-Studio Technician license, R-Studio Corporate license, and R-Studio Standalone license.

Method 1: Data Recovery from a Virtual Machine using R-Studio Technician License
This method works if you have an R-Studio Technician license, or if you are willing to use an activation code to register a copy of R-Studio Emergency.

1. Create or download the R-Studio Emergency ISO image. In this tutorial, we've saved the ISO as RSE.iso.

2. Set up your virtual machine to mount the R-Studio Emergency ISO to a virtual CD/DVD drive.

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3. Start the virtual machine with the CD/DVD drive as the startup device. You may need to change the boot order so that the CD/DVD drive boots first.

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4. The virtual machine will boot into R-Studio Emergency edition. Recover data from the virtual machine as described in the article "Emergency File Recovery Using R-Studio Emergency".

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Tip: You can use the network capabilities of R-Studio Emergency to store recovered files on the host machine. You can also connect a USB device and offload recovered files to an external mass storage device.

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Method 2: Data Recovery from a Virtual Machine using R-Studio Network License
If you have a network license of R-Studio, you can use the R-Studio Agent Emergency edition to perform an emergency data recovery over the network.

1. Create or download the R-Studio Agent Emergency ISO image. In this tutorial, we've saved the ISO as RSAE.iso.

2. Set up your virtual machine to mount the R-Studio Agent Emergency ISO to a virtual CD/DVD drive.

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3. Boot the virtual machine with the CD/DVD drive as the first startup device. You may need to change the boot order so that the CD/DVD drive boots first.

4. From the virtual machine, connect to the machine running R-Studio as described in R-Studio's help: Starting a Computer with the R-Studio Agent Emergency Startup Disk.

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5. Recover data from the virtual machine as described in the article "Emergency Data Recovery over Network".

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Method 3: Data Recovery from a Virtual Machine using R-Studio Local License
If you have a standard local license of R-Studio, you can recover data from a virtual machine by creating an image of the drive, saving the image to another location and then recovering the data from the image.

1. Create or download the R-Studio Agent Emergency ISO image. In this tutorial, we've saved the image as RSAE.iso

2. Set up your virtual machine to mount the R-Studio Agent Emergency ISO to a virtual CD/DVD drive.

3. Boot the virtual machine with the CD/DVD drive as the startup device. You may need to change the boot order so that the CD/DVD drive boots first.

4. From the virtual machine, connect to the machine running R-Studio as described in R-Studio's help documentation: R-Studio Agent.

5. Using R-Studio, create an image of the virtual machine's drive. Save it to another location, such as a network drive or an external USB drive.


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6. In R-Studio, open the image and recover the data from it, as described in R-Studio's help documentation: Images.

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As you can see, recovering data from a virtual machine can be achieved using R-Studio through several different methods. R-Studio's flexibility in working with local drives, networked machines and drive images allows you to utilize R-Studio's full range of data recovery features on virtual machines, just as you would on a physical machine. For additional tips and information, read Data recovery guide.