How To Backup and Restore Group Policy
By Trond Eirik Haavarstein 03/03/2010 – 23:38By now you have probably Created a Central Store for Group Policy Administrative Templates and imported the Terminal Server & XenApp Tuning Group Policy, but what about backup? Did you know that Microsoft have created Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) scripting samples that makes it extremely fast and easy to backup Group Policy Objects (GPO). With these sample scripts you can backup all or single GPO’s, grant permissions, import, restore, list and more. Check out the script examples here.
Download and install the GPMC Scripting Samples and create a weekly scheduled task.
Command line example :
cscript "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Group Policy\GPMC Sample Scripts\BackupAllGPOs.wsf" "%XA%\Group Policy\Backups" /Comment:"GPO Weekly Backup on %DATE%_%TIME%" /Domain:ctxlab.local
If something should happen to your GPO it’s very easy to restore it, with a script or simply by selecting “Restore from Backup” within GPMC shown in the picture above.








2 Responses to “How To Backup and Restore Group Policy”
I went a step further and wanted to have a continuous backup setup on the GPOs to make sure that I could retrieve older ones encase of a overwrite. Since I didn’t want to pay for a software that would do this, MS had a script that is available for use:
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/ScriptCenter/en-us/cdfa9651-59ac-4dc8-b7c2-8efcf8685c68
It works well and has been successful in my environment. Hope this helps other people out there looking for this.
By kunalee on Jun 17, 2010
Thanks,
My friend Jan Egil Ring just posted something similar : Backing up Group Policy Objects using Windows PowerShell
Eric
By admin on Jun 17, 2010