Okay.
In this module, I'm going to talk about some of the group policy management tasks that you can perform
against your group policy environment.
And really most of these are going to come out of the AMC.
And what I wanted to do now that we've talked about kind of basics and some scenarios around using group
policy.
I wanted to dive into more aspects around management and troubleshooting in this last few modules.
So let's go ahead and dig in.
So there's a set of operations that you're going to want to perform against your group policy objects
on an ongoing basis.
And and this goes beyond just the basic stuff that I've talked about in creating new GPOs and editing
them and linking them and all that sort of stuff.
So there's group policy backup and restore, which is kind of one of those hygiene items that you always
want to be doing within your environment.
Can't tell you how many times I've seen situations where users weren't backing up their group policy
objects and then got into a pinch where they made a change that they couldn't restore.
Or they deleted a GPO.
And without that backup, you're just kind of out of the water.
There.
There is a way if you backed up your Active Directory, there is a way to get a GPO backups through
a system state restore.
But it's really painful.
The other aspect that I want to talk about is delegation of the various group policy management tasks.
And group policy has a reasonably rich delegation model.
So I'm going to go into that and talk a little bit about how that works.
And then finally, group policy import.
This is a little bit different from the backup and restore function and I'll talk about how it's different,
but this gives you a number of other scenarios that you can use to take advantage of your backups to
bring in GPOs from other domains or restore other GPOs that have been deleted.
So let's look at backup and rest all to start with.
So GPIO backups can be created in PMC.
And in the last module in this course, I'm going to talk about using PowerShell to manage group policy.
And I'll get into the way you can do backups using PowerShell.
But for the time being, we're going to talk about doing it in the context of GMC.
And you can do backup of a single GPO, or there's a function where you can do a backup of all GPOs.
And I typically recommend folks if you haven't backed up your GPOs before to run the all GPO backup
first and get a baseline.
And then as you make changes over time, you can do one off backups of GPOs that change.
GPOs are used to roll back.
GPIO backups are used for rolling back existing GPOs.
So that's the use case.
And there's a restore function that you can get access to.
So if you make a change to a GPO and you want to roll back that change you can restore from a backup.
Backups are not there to restore a deleted GPO so that you might think that are you know, you make
a backup of a GPO and you delete it.
I can restore it.
Well, the restore function, the back up is good for getting back to a known good state, but the restore
function is not usable in the deleted scenario.
So that's the job of the import function, and I'll talk about that.
Backups themselves are stored in the file system.
And I'll I'll show you what that looks like.
And it's underneath whatever folder you select to store the backups.
You can just specify a unique path or a local path on your workstation where you or you're doing PMC
management.
I typically recommend having a backup of your backups.
So make sure that your backups are stored on some location that gets backed up so that you don't make
your backups and then have your hard drive crash.
And and no longer have access to them.
And then they can be viewed and deleted from the manage back UPS dialogue, which is what I have in
this screenshot here.
And this is just showing you some backups that I did on this downloads folder under my user profile.
And I've got, you know, three different GPOs that have been backed up.
And the folder where the backups are kept is shown at the top and you can change that folder if you
keep backups in different locations.
The list of all the backed up GPOs are shown with their timestamp and their ID and the name of the GPO.
And you can you can put a description on a backup when you make the backup.
So that's what's shown here in that description column.
You can view the settings in the backup, so you can click on a backup and click the View Settings button
and it'll actually show you the settings that have been backed up.
So that's a good way of seeing, you know, what the backup is that you're potentially going to restore.
You can delete a backup so you can use this dialogue.
If you have backups that are no longer valid or they're too old, you can delete them from here.
And you can use the restore button to actually perform the restore against your live GPO.
You can also do this from the GPO itself, but from the managed backups UI, you're able to do that.