Guest file recovery to powered down VM

[TitaniumCoder477]

Clients often ask the most curious questions! This one came to me, and in over 5 years of solution architecture and troubleshooting experience, I have not even considered the question much less looked for an answer. So just now I dug into the Helpcenter but couldn't find anything quickly and conclusively.

Simple question: Can a Windows guest files restore be performed to a powered off VM?
Use case: Files restored are locked by a dozen services and/or processes. Instead of tracking the services and processes and killing them all before performing the restore, could the VM be powered off and the guest file restore be performed to overwrite the files?

Thanks in advance!

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi James,
I had that question few weeks ago too!
Technically - "maybe"(we could have tried to mount vhdx, present guest volume and do our restore magic), however I see so many (security) questions here....who will authenticate the restore? since target OS is shut down, there is no target service that can check your restore operator authority - an injection of a file(say, restore) in vhdx in this case is a serious security breach. What about BitLocker encrypted drives? What about Shielded VMs?