During quarantine, much of business was on hold. A client approached us whose work laptop was temporarily given to his son for studying. Everything would have been fine, if not for the fact that the student ran out of space and accidentally deleted a virtual machine containing car programming, coding, and diagnostics software worth over €20,000.
After analyzing the entire hexadecimal code, traces of the virtual disk (.vmdk) were found. However, due to its large size (650GB), a straightforward recovery was impossible. Another challenge was that it was necessary not only to recover individual files but the entire system intact so that the programs would function with their installed licenses.
For these reasons, artificial intelligence algorithms were employed to reconstruct a working system. The process utilized all available computing resources in our lab, and after 74 hours, the .vmdk file was successfully rebuilt and loaded into a new virtual machine.