Restoring a GPO

[kjstech]

Hello,

I never tried this before but I wanted to reach out to see what ramifications there would be (if any) assuming I tried to restore a group policy object from Monday evening.

I am in the Veeam Explorer for Active Directory in Veeam 9.0.0.1491 and I located a GPO I want to view. However if I compare the selected object the only difference is the version number in the backup is 2097350 and the version number in production is 2097357. No where can I see what settings are actually different (which I was hoping I could do).

If I would restore this GPO to our one Virtual DC, will that virtual DC replicate it to our physical DC and our second virtual dc via active directory replication? The reason I'm skeptical is because the version number will be lower than what is on the other two DC's so I would think the other two DC's would just replicate their newer version back over what is restored.

Thank you for your assistance.

[foggy]

However if I compare the selected object the only difference is the version number in the backup is 2097350 and the version number in production is 2097357. No where can I see what settings are actually different (which I was hoping I could do).

This is expected. Veeam Explorer for AD shows only AD object attributes, while actual GPO settings are stored on the file system and are not parsed/displayed. The entire GPO object will be restored in any case, including all its settings/configuration.

If I would restore this GPO to our one Virtual DC, will that virtual DC replicate it to our physical DC and our second virtual dc via active directory replication? The reason I'm skeptical is because the version number will be lower than what is on the other two DC's so I would think the other two DC's would just replicate their newer version back over what is restored.

GPO version should be incremented upon restore, otherwise it will not be applied.

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Keith,

Just finished a discussion with Foggy and just to make sure it is all clear... When you restore the GPO, AD automatically increases the USN so at that moment, replication will take the restored GPO to be the "newest" one and replicates it to the other DC's... So automatically it will be incremented upon restore.

Mike