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export-ADData

Announcing export-ADData: Open Source Toolkit for Flexible, Robust AD Import & Export

Hello PowerShell users seeking a systematic way to import or mass-register Active Directory accounts,

Have you found that when it comes to importing or exporting AD users, groups and computers, most solutions are either fragments of basic tutorials (like Import-Csv | New-ADUser for particular tasks) or locked behind expensive enterprise tools? For real-world migrations, reorganizations, or large-scale user/group/computer registrations, these approaches just don’t provide the flexibility, safety, or control that busy AD admins need.

That’s why I created export-ADData—an open-source PowerShell toolkit that aims to fill this gap. I’m not selling anything, and there’s no catch here: I built these scripts to handle complex AD tasks in my own work, and am sharing them in hopes they’ll help others facing similar challenges.

What Makes export-ADData Different?

• General-Purpose, Ready-To-Use, real-world scripts
• Full round-trip support: Export users, groups, and computers (with all attributes) to CSV, and import them back—even across different domains or OU structures.
• Advanced import features:
  • Cross-domain migration
  • OU flattening and reorganization
  • Group membership restoration
  • Automatic creation of missing intermediate OUs
  • Flexible mapping and granular container placement
  • Builtin mechanisms to ease modification of some tricky properties
• Robust validation: Strong argument checking and error handling help avoid accidental mistakes.
• Detailed logging: All actions are logged for accountability and troubleshooting.
• Safe-to-repeat/practical resume: The import script never overwrites existing acccounts during standard import. If some records fail (e.g., due to missing groups or prerequisites), you can fix the issues and rerun safely—only missing objects are processed, making staged or partial imports straightforward.
  Note: There’s a special “fixup” mode for post-import group attribute adjustments, which can update the ManagedBy property if needed.
• Extensive documentation
  • Help header on each script
  • Detailed README with design concepts, usage examples, supposed senarios, spot-on notes on advanced features
  • Appendix documentations: Step-by-step procedures to prepare source CSV file to import accounts
• Completely free and open source: No paid edition, no upsells, and no hidden features, ease of customization.

Why Share Here?

I’ve noticed many questions here about bulk AD import/export, but most answers only cover basic cmdlet usage. There isn’t much available for admins who need to handle complex migrations, mass re-orgs, or recoveries with confidence.

Limitations and Transparency

• There’s currently no “dry-run” mode; all actions are real, but existing users/groups/computers are never overwritten during standard import, except for the optional FixGroup fixup which updates group attributes as needed.
• This tool is designed for targeted AD migration and reorganization—not entire forest/domain migrations.

Repo & Documentation:
https://github.com/Tatsuya-Nonogaki/export-ADData
README can be viewed also at:
export-ADData|GitHub Pages

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, suggestions, or want to share your experience with similar projects, I’d love to hear from you here or via GitHub.
For questions or feedback, please use the GitHub Issues page—selecting the “General Question” template helps keep things organized.