Group Policy Backup Script

It's group policy cleanup time for me, which means a few things:

• I Need to bone up on group policy itself
• I Need to get group policy cleaned up
• I Need to automate as much as possible

Chapter 11 in Jeremy's group policy fundamentals book has some great scripts for automating backups for group policy using Powershell.  However, since the book was published the group policy team at Microsoft has released the group policy module for Powershell v2.  They also posted a script to backup all group policies that have changed in the last month.

I wanted a bit more flexibility in an automated group policy backup solution so I wrote ScheduledGPOBackups.ps1, which you can find the current code for after the jump.  The quick description is that using the configuration block in the script you can define where to back GPOs up to, how often to backup everything and how often to backup only what has changed since the last good backup.  Schedule the script to automatically run every so often depending on your needs and you should have a nice GPO backup solution.

Using this script will require that you use Powershell 2.0 with the grouppolicy module available, which means Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 with the RSAT installed.  I'm going to keep working on it to include cleanup of old backups, backup of WMI filters and starter GPOs, etc. but I thought this was a good enough start to share.

Enjoy!