Backing Up IIS: A Primer

You can find many articles about managing and configuring IIS and its metabase. However, a lot of confusion and misconceptions still exist about one of the most important aspects of managing IIS—generating a good backup. This month, I introduce you to the fundamentals of properly backing up and restoring IIS, including pitfalls, gotchas, and some tricks to remember. I show you how to back up

• the entire system
• IIS settings (i.e., the metabase)
• data
• security information

Backing Up the Entire System
To back up your IIS machine, you can use Windows NT backup procedures or a third-party backup program to generate a full-system backup. This type of backup will ensure that you have all the data necessary to rebuild a system from a catastrophic failure. The Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Operations Guide, which is part of the Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit, provides excellent information about backing up your Win2K system. The Backup chapter of the Windows 2000 Resource Kits Web site (http://www.microsoft.com/windows 2000/techinfo/reskit/en-us/core/fndf_ bkp_qale.asp) also provides useful information. For information about backing up NT 4.0, read Chapter 4 of the Microsoft Windows NT Server Resource Guide, which is part of the Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit.

A full-system backup takes more time and resources than simply backing up the metabase, but it ensures that you have all the information you need. It's also the best way to guarantee that you can recover from a fatal crash. Of all the backup processes I talk about in this article, the full-system backup does the most to safeguard your Web server. Before you perform a full-system backup, be sure to stop the Web services so that all related files are released and will be successfully backed up.

Restoring the Entire System
If your Web server suffers a fatal crash or you need to rebuild a system, you can easily use the full backup you made to do so. However, here's one caveat to remember when restoring a Win2K system. Win2K restores only to the currently active registry, which means that the drive and system root must be the same as when you made the backup. In other words, you can't perform a parallel installation and be running that instance of Windows when you restore the system. If you made the backup with C:\winnt as your system root, you need to rebuild the crashed system to the point at which you can boot into C:\winnt before you perform the restore. This consideration isn't applicable to NT 4.0 because the registry is just a file in that OS. But I still recommend that you run restore only from the directory to which you were planning to restore.

Backing Up the Metabase
After you have a full-system backup in place, you can make periodic backups of just the IIS metabase. (For more information about the IIS metabase, see William Sheldon, "Getting to Know the Metabase," January 2001, InstantDoc ID 16179; "Getting to Edit the Metabase," February 2001, InstantDoc ID 16462; and "Getting to Script the Metabase," April 2001, InstantDoc ID 20058.) Backing up the metabase in IIS 5.0 is fairly easy, and you should back it up any time you make a change to your IIS settings.

Backing up the IIS 5.0 metabase. To back up the metabase in IIS 5.0, open Internet Services Manager (ISM). Right-click your computer name, then select Backup/Restore Configuration. In the Configuration Backup/Restore dialog box, which Figure 1 shows, click Create backup, then type a name for the backup file. (Note that the backup software prohibits any special characters in the name.) Click OK. You've now backed up the metabase for this machine. For more information about backing up the IIS 5.0 metabase, see the Microsoft article "HOW TO: Create a Metabase Backup By Using IIS 5" (http://support.microsoft.com/support/ kb/articles/q300/6/72.asp). For a Windows Script Host (WSH) script that you can use to back up the IIS 5.0 metabase as a scheduled task, see the Microsoft article "HOW TO: Schedule Metabase Backups Using WSH" (http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q302/8/88.asp).

Backing up the IIS 4.0 metabase. In IIS 4.0, the metabase-backup process is the same as in IIS 5.0, but it's not as reliable and you might not get a good copy of the backup file. For backing up the metabase on an IIS 4.0 machine, I recommend that you use a full-system backup. If such a backup isn't an option, you might be able to make a manual copy of the metabase. To do so, stop all Web services manually on your production IIS machine by typing

net stop iisadmin /y

at a command prompt. Then, copy the metabase.bin file and rename it metabase.bak. For security purposes, you might want to store metabase .bak on another machine or medium. However, you can keep a local copy, too.