Discussion on:

Tips on copying and backing up Group Policy Objects

Through a copy operation is really safe. How have you tweaked or saved them this way?

We have a regular backup policy for our GPO's (since we use them for "everything" domain), but have found a bit of a problem when we copied our 2003 GPO's into our newly migrated 2010 Domain. It appears as some of them don't work the way they did in 2003. Is there a specific reason for that? Are they not compatible? We also found that our WSUS policies don't seem to be working in the 2010 domain as well (at least not as efficiently as they used to)

I don't think there is a Server 2010, at least not one by MS. I'd recommend upgrading your domain rather than installing new and importing if you are going from 2003 to 2008R2. Personally I haven't seen any issues going this route.

That's what I get for creating the post in haste! Should have said Server 2008 R2. Thanks

I use a simple PowerShell script to backup our GPO's. Since we have multiple domains, I create a folder based on the domain name and date and copy the GPOs with a simple report for reference.

#Configure Variables
$Date = ((get-date).tostring('MMM-dd-yyyy'))
$BkupFolder = "\\ServerName\Backups\GPO Backups\$env:userdomain\$Date"

#Create new folder based on domain and date
New-Item -type Directory -Path $BkupFolder

# Need to import this module to manage GPOs
Import-Module GroupPolicy

#Backup GPO's in the current domain to the specified folder
Write-Host "Backing up $env:userdomain GPO's to $BkupFolder"
Backup-GPO -All -Path $BkupFolder > $BkupFolder\BkupReport.txt

Hi All,

Great topic!

Do you have any tip on how to backup the connections to the OU's? The scenario is to simulate a complete server crash.

First I restore the AD, then restore the GP objects and if possible restore the connections to an OU in the Group policy manager.

Is this possible you think?

Best,
Jon