Access Denied: Backing Up GPOs

Can you tell me how to back up or at least print the settings in a Group Policy Object (GPO) so that I can rebuild it if someone inadvertently deletes it or it becomes corrupted? A backup function would be nice, but I'd settle for a print option.

Recently, Microsoft released the new Group Policy Management Console (GPMC). GPMC lets you manage all GPOs for an entire forest from one place. The console helps you see how GPOs will be applied and does a much better job of exposing GPO options, such as GPO permissions and status, than the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Active Directory Users and Computers and Group Policy Editor snap-ins do.

More relevant to your question, though, GPMC includes support for backing up GPOs and for saving them as an HTML report. Figure 2 shows the Settings tab of a GPO, on which you can view all of a GPO's policy settings on one report that you can print or save to an HTML file.

To use GPMC, you need a Windows Server 2003 computer or Windows XP workstation with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and the Windows .NET Framework installed. You can download GPMC and a white paper about the tool at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/gpmc/gpmcintro.mspx.