Embodiments of the present disclosure disclose a method and an apparatus for restoring a NETCONF server to factory defaults, and relate to the field of configuration management technologies. A NETCONF server receives a command for restoring to factory defaults sent by a NETCONF client, where the command for restoring to factory defaults is a remote procedure call (RPC) command that is based on a Yang model of the NETCONF for restoring the NETCONF server to the factory defaults. The NETCONF server replaces data in the running configuration datastore with factory defaults of the NETCONF server according to the command for restoring to factory defaults.