I'm having a hard time copying a VM from my ESXi 4 ... I never tried to copy a VM because I always did the backup inside the VM but now I want to retire this server and need to get a final full backup.

What I tried so far:
1. Using vCenter "Browse Datastore": this is really slow and just keeps aborting after 20-30 hours (the VM has two flat disks which grew to about 200 GB each and with maybe ~40 GB real data inside).
2. Using VMware converter: this works for other (smaller) machines on the same host-server, but the specific VM hangs on "retrieving data".
3. Copying sftp-server binary to /sbin. This enables me to connect with ssh-fs to the ESXi, but transfer only works for small files (<10MB) with larger files I only get "Connection closed by server with exitcode 139" (no other usefull information in client/server log file, tried via veeam-fastscp, winscp, filezilla ...).

Has anyone another idea to get a backup of this VM?