The purpose of the 'writedb/readdb' is to, among other things, remove unwanted items from the IDB. If you have a session that is still protected, this will not be touched, and, since the procedure does not touch your configured backups, it will have no affect on these
I think that your idea of being able to copy the DP installation to another Virtual machine is a good one, I normally recommend that DP be stopped, and copies of the IDB and the Configuration files be saved before doing anything like this, but, making a copy of the VIrtual machine will serve the same purpose
