I have just done the stupidest thing. I was freeing up (rm -rf) space
on what I thought was a storage directory (/srv), but I have now just
discovered that it contained a critical qemu image. The image is a W7
VM and is still running; it appears unaffected. The /srv partition
is the largest on this machine and the testdisk recovery image of this
partition (~170G) is too large to fit anywhere on the hard drive.

This machine is mission critical. I cannot take it offline for another
6 hours, and I'll need to have it back up asap, (within an hour) so I
need to plan my attack.

So some very naive questions.

Best option: 1) can I retrieve the deleted qcow image from a running
instance of that image?

Fall back option: 2) does anyone know if a new installation of the
(Dell) W7 iso will still activate now that W7 is EOL?

I know that option 2 (writing to disk) will reduce the possibility of a
testdisk recovery. So, here's Q3: can i squeeze the second W7 VM into a
6G qcow image (remaining free space in /home)?

I'm not going to do anything for a while, except think. And hide from
the boss. All help would be appreciated.

fraser