Exporting and Importing Windows DNS zones

Exporting a DNS zone is easy. Use the dnscmd.

Importing too is easy but the commands aren’t so obvious. Again you use dnscmd, with the /zoneadd switch as though you are creating a new zone. The help page for this misses out on an important switch though – /load – which lets you load the zone from an exported or pre-existing file.

You can find this switch in the dnscmd help:

So the way to import a zone is as follows: first, copy the exported file into the c:\windows\system32\dns folder of the DNS server and preferably rename it so the extension is a .dns (not required, just a nice thing to do). Then run a command similar to below:

That’s it. This will create a primary zone called “blah.com” and use the zone file that’s already in the location.

Note that you can’t use this technique for AD integrated zones. But that’s no issue. Simply import as above and then convert the zone to AD integrated via the GUI.