Backing up and recovering the Windows IIS Metabase

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One of those things you just have to do sometimes is taking a nice backup of your IIS metabase. As we all know, exchange stores its configuration information in active directory but the 2003 version of exchange relies heavily on IIS to be able to function. IIS does not read information from active directory but from its own metabase! So we need a something to sync those 2 and that little something is called the DS2MB service which runs under the 2003 system attendant. Knowing that, most settings will be read back in to the metabase (it is one way traffic only) but some things, like certificates, are not stored in active directory.

So to backup the IIS metabase do the following:

  • Open the IIS Manager.
  • Right-click the IIS server whose metabase data you want to backup.
  • Select “All Tasks” from the menu and select the “backup/restore configuration”.
    • Note that if you want the backup to be portable you need to select the “encrypt backup using password” option and type in a password.
  • Click on the “create backup”, choose a name for the file and click ok
  • Click close

Note that the default folder for backup is %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\MetaBack. If you created a portable backup there are 2 files you need to copy over to the new server: Backup.SC0 and backup.MD0

 

And to recover the IIS metabase data:

  • Open the IIS Manager.
  • Right-click the IIS server whose metabase data you want to restore, select All Tasks from the shortcut menu, and then select Backup/Restore Configuration.
  • The Configuration Backup/Restore dialog box opens. The Configuration Backup/Restore dialog box displays the following information:
    • The initial configuration backups created when IIS was first installed.
    • All manually created backups.
    • All history files
  • Select the backup that you want to use for the restore and then click the Restore button to start the restore of the metabase data.
  • Click Yes to start the restore.