EPM - Manual Exporting & Importing of policies for Backup

It is important and in cases critical to export policies to local/shared drive in case of an unintentional deletion or misconfiguration of policies.

To this day, if policies are deleted, there is no way to restore them.

In this case, it is up to the user to manually export policies for future import,

Here I will present the basic steps for exporting and importing of policies.

FYI: If you have to work on two different Sets at the same time, make sure you don't open the Sets on different Tabs in the same browser, use different browser instances instead.

EXPORT

ADVANCED POLICIES

• Navigate to the policies that you plan to export
  Once you click the Export All/Selected button, a vpf file will be automatically downloaded to your Downloads folder.
  Advanced Policies → Actions → Export → [ Export All/Export Selected ]
  
  
• Make sure you keep the exported policies well organized and if needed rename the vpf file to best describe its content.
  
  

APPLICATION GROUPS

• Notice that you export Trusted Sources from the 'Trusted Sources' button,
  And not from 'Groups'.
  Application Groups → Trusted Sources → Export → [Export Select Trusted Sources/Export All Trusted Sources/Export All To Excel]
  
  
• Notice that Exporting to excel is only for viewing purposes, and not for importing.
• The Application Groups exports are separated into two methods
  • Export by Group
    Application Groups → Groups → Export → [Export All/Export Selected]
    
    Export by group exports also the dependencies of the policies, such as related Dialogs (UI) etc.
    
    
  • Export by Applications
    Application Groups → Applications → Export Selected
    
    Once you export by application, you can later import those application to different policies.
    For example if you export all applications from the Elevate policy, you can import them to the Run Normally policy or any other policy if you need so.

IMPORT

ADVANCED POLICIES

• Navigate to Advanced Policies and click on 'Actions'
  Advanced Policies → Actions → Import
  
  An Import Dialog will appear asking you to select a vpf file to Import.
  Pay attention that once you Open a file and click 'Import', it will not ask you to confirm or cancel, it will import
  straight away and show you the summary of the policies that where imported and their respective Dialogs (if used).
  Make sure that you import the right vpf file. (for the Advanced Policies the filename starts with 'Policies'..)
  
  The imported policies are deactivated by default, and if there are duplicate policies an incremental digit will be appended to the policy name for example (1), (2) ..
  
  

APPLICATION GROUPS

• To import Trusted Sources policies, go to Application Groups, select 'Trusted Sources'
  Application Groups → Trusted Sources → Import Trusted Sources...
  
  The same import dialog will appear asking you for a vpf file to import, make sure that you import the correct file (Trusted_Sources..)
  
  
• To import Applications and Groups
  Application Groups → Groups Import
  
  Notice that once you import a Group, it will be imported to the 'Custom Application Groups' and will be deactivated by default.
  
  You can select the Applications from the [IMPORTED] groups.
  right click and move them by clicking 'Move to Group...' and select the target group from the dialog.
  
  Usually I would move them to their Active groups for example, the above selected Executable I would move to Run Normally Group in the 'Predefined Windows Application Groups', and delete the deactivated [IMPORTED] group from the Custom Application Groups.