If you are facing the challenge of recovering a GPO that was completely deleted and no longer exists inside Active Directory, you will need slightly higher rights to accomplish that. You will need to have the same access permissions as someone who is able to create new GPOs, because that is essentially what you will be doing when you walk through the process of recovering that deleted GPO. It creates a new one, and pumps the settings back into it.

To create new GPOs, or to restore deleted GPOs, you need to be a member of a built-in Active Directory Security Group that is called Group Policy Creator Owners. We will learn a little bit more about this group in the Delegating permissions to manage Group Policy section.

As always, if you have access to a user account that is part of the Domain Admins or Enterprise Admins groups, you will have all the permissions you need to do anything inside Group Policy, including the restoration of deleted GPOs.