When you recover a GPO that was still in existence, all of your links should still be fine and dandy. But, if you have restored a GPO that had previously been deleted, we now need to do some damage control. GPO Links will have to be re-established manually. Why doesn't this happen automatically as part of the GPO restore process? Well, what if link locations changed between the date of your last backup and your date of GPO restoration? Or, what if the GPO was deleted because it was causing problems? You would not want the restore process to immediately relink and therefore start causing those problems all over again. So, the restoration process leaves it on our shoulders to relink the GPO after it has been recovered. Thankfully, there is information stored right inside the backup files about what links existed at the time the backup was taken. You can view this information by doing the following:
- Right-click on Group Policy Objects and choose Manage Backups....
- If it's not already selected, browse to the location of your backup file.
- Select the GPO that you restored or are planning to restore, and then click View Settings....
- Inside the presented HTML file, browse to the Links section. This shows you all of the links that were active when this backup file was created, and you can use this information to manually re-establish links to OUs in your environment after the restore is complete:
