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objectpowershellbackup
Oren
Oren

Reputation: 113

Is it possible to backup Powershell objects using Export-clixml

Is it valid to export objects in powershell using Export-clixml and use the .xml file as a backup?

I'm going to do a massive deletion of thousand of MailContacts in my forest and i want to do a backup of all those MailContacts before i delete them

Thanks in advance, O.Z

Upvotes: 0

Views: 560

Answers (1)

Keith Hill
Keith Hill

Reputation: 201902

I would say no because when you read the objects back in, PowerShell doesn't recreate the original MailContact objects. It creates an object of a special type representing only the public data fields of the original object. If you were to execute this:

Start-Process notepad
Get-Process notepad | Export-Clixml notepad.clixml
Stop-Process -name notepad

And then import the clixml file like so and dump it to the screen:

PS> $n = Import-Clixml .\notepad.clixml
PS> $n

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K) VM(M)   CPU(s)     Id ProcessName
-------  ------    -----      ----- -----   ------     -- -----------
     78       7     1280       5916    96     0.06  32752 notepad

It looks like you have a notepad process running but the Import-CliXml hasn't recreated the Notepad process. And you will notice the deserialized object doesn't have any of the Process methods like Kill() or WaitForExit(). That's because the imported object contains only a snapshot of the original object's data. There is no feasible way to make the normal methods work on an object like this. You can see this by running the imported object through Get-Member:

PS> $n | Get-Member    

   TypeName: Deserialized.System.Diagnostics.Process

Name                       MemberType   Definition
----                       ----------   ----------
GetType                    Method       type GetType()
ToString                   Method       string ToString(), string ToString(string format, System.IFormatProvider for...
Company                    NoteProperty System.String Company=Microsoft Corporation
CPU                        NoteProperty System.Double CPU=0.0625
...

Note the type name Deserialized.System.Diagnostics.Process.

Now this is not to say that you couldn't use the data from these objects to manually reconstruct the MailContacts but I would look for a more direct route. For instance, couldn't you backup the file the MailContacts are contained in - assuming they are stored in a file? Or perhaps there is an API to allow saving contacts to a file?

Upvotes: 1

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