Windows Server 2012 R2-Chapter13-Group Policy Backup Recovery
Author: kumaran kumaran
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Just like any other critical data, or active directory related resources, you should back up your group policy objects to help protect their integrity. The good news is that the group policy management console already has a built in tool to help you do this. So here I'm on DC one, and I'm in the group policy management console already. And I'm highlighted on our group policy objects. And that's why I see a list of all of our group policy objects in the domain. If I were to right click on any one of these, you will see that there are options, first of all for backing up, and option to restore from a backup, or to import settings from a previously backed up group policy object. So here if I select that I want to back up this group policy object, it takes me to a window where it wants the location where I want to back it up to. And if you take a look on my C drive, I have created a folder called GPO Backup. It's just an empty folder that I created, and I'm going to use that to store the backups. So I click ok, and then backup. And there's really not a whole lot more to it. Watch what happens. Now depending on how many settings have been configured in the particular group policy object, the speed of your machine, whether you're doing this backup across a network, and all sorts of other factors, this could take a little bit longer, could take a little bit shorter. In this case you'll see that it went all the way though and succeeded fairly quickly. And the reason is because there's really I believe only one setting that has been set in this particular group policy object. And I'm backing up to a local hard drive. So I'll click ok, and just like that it's backed up. Now one thing to keep in mind, is that's only taking the settings and putting it into a backup file. That file then needs to be backed up through your regular backup mechanism. So the actual file that is now stored in that folder, you need to make sure that that's backed up. So very often you might do this out to a shared backup folder or something like that. Now if something were to have happened to this particular GPO, maybe somebody went in and they made some changes and, or maybe it was even you went in and made changes and you're thinking no, I just want to undo all of that. I want to go back to the way it was. Well you can restore from backup by simply right clicking, selecting restore from backup. You get a little wizard here. You get a welcome screen. Click next. It wants to know the folder where you would be looking for a backup. So here we have our GPO backup folder. Click next. It recognizes that the folder redirection GPO was backed up. And here's something that's very cool about this process here. Instead of just saying, yeah that's the one I want. If I'm not sure, and I want to double check, I can click on view settings. And it will show me all the settings that have been enabled on this particular GPO. So I'm gonna click show all, and if I were to scroll down through this report, I could find any settings that have been set. And you'll notice the only setting that's really set here is the folder redirection that has been enabled. Ok, so I think that's a really nice feature to be able to see what you're recovering before you recover it. But assuming that this was the backup I wanted to recover, I go ahead and click next and finish. And once again, there are a number of factors that are involved with this, but usually it's a fairly quick process, and here you can see it already has succeeded and it's been recovered. Now another nice feature, gonna point it out, was the ability to import settings. So if I were to, let's say, create a new, and we'll just call this New GPO. And this new GPO I want it to have the settings from another group policy object. And I know that we backed up that group policy object. And I should point out, it's not typical that you would do it in the same domain like this. This would be more along the lines of if maybe there's a GPO, and that GPO we might even call it folder redirection, and it's in a different domain, and one domain administrator knows another domain administrator who has already created the settings, and we just want to import them, we can do that. We just simply right click, and say import settings. And you'll notice that this is going to be very very similar to the restore process. I'm gonna click next, one big difference here is it's telling you hey, when you import settings, you're gonna delete any existing settings. So you may wanna create a backup of this GPO before you import the settings from the other GPO. In this case I don't need to worry about that, cause I don't have any settings. So I will click next. Then it wants to know where is this backup you want to import from. So we have our GPO backup folder, I'll click next. Then just like with the recovery, here's the backup that exists.