Information Technology Reference
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GPO Backup and Restore When you back up a GPO, the policy settings are backed up
but so are the security filtering settings, delegation settings, and WMI filter links. What is not
backed up are the WMI filter files associated with the WMI links, IPSec policies, and GPO con-
tainer links. Backing up a GPO is a simple three-step process:
1. In GPMC, right-click the GPO in the Group Policy Objects folder and click Back Up.
2. Select (or create) a folder where the GPO should be stored.
3. Enter a description of the GPO, if needed, and click Back Up.
Multiple GPOs can be stored in the same folder, so you need not create a new folder each
time you back up a GPO. The folder where you store GPO backups should be secure and backed
up by a regular system backup routine. You can also right-click the Group Policy Objects folder
and select options to back up all GPOs and manage backups.
The procedure for restoring a GPO varies, as follows:
Restore a previous version —If the settings of a backed up GPO have been changed and
you need to revert to an older version, you right-click the GPO in the Group Policy
Objects folder, and click Restore from Backup. All policy and security settings in the cur-
rent GPO are replaced by the backup GPO's settings.
Restore a deleted GPO —Right-click the Group Policy Objects folder and click Manage
Backups to open the Manage Backups dialog box (see Figure 7-24). You can select which
GPO you want to restore, view a backed up GPO's settings, or delete a backed up GPO.
Multiple versions of backed up GPOs are listed by default, or you can specify seeing only
the latest version of each GPO.
Figure 7-24
Managing GPO backups
Import settings —You can import settings from a backed up GPO to an existing GPO. This
is similar to restoring a GPO, except the existing GPO need not be the same GPO as the
backed up GPO. As with a GPO restore, all existing settings in the current GPO are deleted.
 
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