Backing Up and Restoring the IIS7 Configuration

December 28th, 2008 by Paul Sterley | Filed under IIS, In the Windows Box, Windows Server.

In IIS6, if you wanted to back up and restore IIS, you used the GUI to back up and restore the mysterious “metabase”.

In IIS7, you will need to use a command prompt (with elevated permissions).

Go to c:\windows\system32\inetsrv, and run the following:

appcmd add backup “YourBackupNameHere” and press enter.

This creates a folder under c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\backup called “YourBackupNameHere” or whatever you typed in there.

In this folder there are several files that you can mess with if you choose. In particular, the file called “applicationHost.config” contains most of the settings you’ll probably be looking for.

This can be useful for backing up IIS, copying the folder, modifying the XML files in there, and then restoring the modified files. If the desired result is not achieved, you can restore the unmodified backup.

The restore command is:

appcmd restore backup “YourBackupNameHere”.

Enjoy!

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2 Responses to “Backing Up and Restoring the IIS7 Configuration”

  1. Homer_J | 17/06/09

    Will this backup be able to be restored to a different server if needed (disaster recovery)

  2. Paul Sterley | 17/06/09

    I don’t know. Want to give it a try and post the result?

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