My QCow2 disk (and IMG file) was 50Gb but the restored data I got was ~300Gb before I had to stop it due to full disk. Now we have a /dev/loop0 device under /dev.īut before we start the recovery, make sure you have lots of available disk space. This can be done using losetup losetup /dev/loop0 ~/dump.img It can be found here And finally recover some filesįirst we need to make the IMG file available to the Linux system as if it was a real drive under /dev. I stumbled upon a software called testdisk, for recovering files and broken partitions/filesystems. read_qcow2 broken.qcow2 dump.img Download recovery software Using my own software to read qcow2 file and write it as an IMG file. WARNING! This is not a replacement for a real backup, and it can only recover files existing in the QCow2 image and not files that are only in the backing file. Then I found a software to recover my file from a broken ext4 partition.

I wrote lots of C code to be able to convert the QCow2 file into an IMG file. I have successfully restored data from my QCow2 file with a missing backing file.

Testdisk 7.2 wip download