GPMC Migrating GPOS between domains

There are four operations that GPMC provides to allow for archival and recovery of GPOs, and for migrating GPOs from one environment to another:

• Copy. A copy operation allows you to transfer settings from an existing GPO in Active Directory directly into a new GPO. The new GPO created during the copy operation is given a new GUID and is unlinked. You can use a copy operation to transfer settings to a new GPO in the same domain, another domain in the same forest, or a domain in another forest. Because a copy operation uses an existing GPO in Active Directory as its source, trust is required between the source and destination domains. Copy operations are suited for moving Group Policy between production environments, and for migrating Group Policy that has been tested in a test domain or forest to a production environment, as long as there is trust between the source and destination domains.
• Backup. Backing up a GPO copies the data in the GPO to the file system. The backup function also serves as the export capability for GPOs. A GPO backup can be used to restore the GPO to the backed-up state, or to import the settings in the backup to another GPO.
• Import. The Import operation transfers settings into an existing GPO in Active Directory using a backed-up GPO in the file system location as its source. Import operations can be used to transfer settings from one GPO to another GPO within the same domain, to a GPO in another domain in the same forest, or to a GPO in a domain in a different forest. The import operation always places the backed-up settings into an existing GPO. It erases any pre-existing settings in the destination GPO. Import does not require trust between the source domain and destination domain. Therefore it is useful for transferring settings across forests and domains that don’t have trust. Importing settings into a GPO does not affect its DACL, links on sites domains or organizational units to that GPO, or a link to a WMI filter.
• Restore. Restoring a GPO re-creates the GPO from the data in the backup. A restore operation can be used in both of the following cases: the GPO was backed up but has since been deleted, or the GPO is live and you want to roll back to a known previous state.