... moving datastore file "flat" to the 3 datastore, deleting the deltas in 3 datastore ...
Please explain what you did as detailed as possible! If you really deleted the delta files from the datastore, you actually deleted production data!?
Did you backup the VM's vmware*.log files? Please post a list of all files which belong to the VM (with sizes, time stamps, ...) and compress/zip the VM's .vmx, .vmsd as well as all the .log files and attach the .zip file to a reply post.
André