virtualbox.org

Hello, guys, I have a serious problem here. I had a problem with my hds and lost a VM that I had with Windows 7, but I was able to recover only a snapshot of this VM through data recovery. So I do not have the .vdi medium of this snapshot, how do I access its files?

A snapshot is a differential image of the sectors of virtual hard drive, between your base virtual hard drive and whenever you took the snapshot. So in a sense what you have are modified sectors of a hard drive. I'd say it would be almost impossible to recover anything. You didn't have a backup, right?

Well, its easy. The snapshot is effectively a patch script telling you how to patch the previous state sectors to get to the current state. So, all you have to do is successfully wish into existence the previous state and then you'll be able to restore and recover the image contents. Or, travel back in time and slap the head of the person who decided to rely on snapshots for data storage without researching them first. On your way back from the past pause and slap the head of the person who couldn't be bothered to make backups of important data.

I.e. other than fantasy, there is no solution to your problem. You may be able to recover random sectors from the snapshot VDI, but it's almost certainly less work just to start again.