Her colleague, Tom, had shrugged. "Clone the VM. Spin up Linux. Use vmfs-tools ."

She opened a third-party tool: A freeware gem that could force-feed raw disk images to Windows. Her fingers flew.

Maya slammed her fist on the desk. Twelve hours. No backup.

And as Maya packed up her gear, she made a mental note: never mount VMFS writable on Windows again. But for a desperate hour at 2:00 AM? It had worked just long enough.