Whenever discussing the restoration of data from a backup, it is always the goal that you never actually have to enact these steps. Recovering backup data is generally associated with disaster-recovery, which is not a situation that any IT professional wants to find themselves in the middle of. However, there are two different reasons why you might find yourself needing to restore a GPO, and one of them is something that can actually be quite common. Restoring a GPO could become necessary in the event that a GPO is lost, deleted, or somehow corrupted. In these cases, you are still in that disaster-recovery boat, wanting to recover the GPO in order to restore order to the force.

The second, and much more common, reason to restore a GPO is to roll it back to a prior point in time. Let's say you have a working GPO, and want to add an extra setting into it. You take a backup of that GPO before you make the change, and then edit the GPO to introduce the new setting. Let's also pretend that you forgot to test this setting out on some laptops before rolling it out to production, and now you discover that this new setting is causing a big issue. There are two different paths you could follow. One would be to re-edit the GPO and remove the setting that you just plugged in, but depending on the setting (or settings), you might have to spend quite a bit of time poking around in here to negate all the things you put into place. Alternatively, you can simply recover the GPO to its previous state, based on the backup that you took right before you made the change.

This second scenario is one that you may have to utilize numerous times during your role as an AD/GPO administrator.