Moved HA hassos_ova-3.13.vmdk VMDK file, missing account and backups

Did a stupid thing and left some RDP port forwards on my router years ago and forgot all about it, till a hacker got me with some Ransomware last night. They managed to encrypt most of my server files, but they didn’t encrypt my hassos_ova-3.13.vmdk file for some reason. I have a backup copy, but it’s quite old and I’ve done a lot to it since. I was hoping I could get into it on another machine with VMware, but when I boot it up, it asked me to create a new account and everything is pretty much gone except for the supervisor plugins.

Is this normal behavior? A security feature? Is there any way to retrieve my backups/snapshots? Or is this the work of the hackers too, and maybe why they didn’t bother to encrypt it?

Turns out, everything was gone because I had Samba share installed and the hacker also encrypted all of Home Assistant’s data files.