Restoring IIS 6.0

I love the Internet. I use it every day. But when it comes to making websites work, it's just not one of my strong areas. I've gone through a good portion of last decade working for smaller companies where being the "network administrator" meant being a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. While I don't mind having to search for solutions to issues with software that I don't use often, I've also learn which bits of the tech realm I'd rather leave to someone else. One of those is IIS.

However, this isn't all about me hating on Internet Information Services. Last week, I actually had a experience restoring IIS 6.0 that was remarkably smooth and successful - restoring our company intranet to a different machine.

In order for this to be successful, I needed to have a portable backup of the metabase, my web folders and ASP 2.0 (which we needed for some small web-based applications). I was missing the ASP 2.0 on the base installation of IIS on the new server, but that was easy enough to correct. The web folders were getting backed up nightly, but I was missing the metabase, which was key to making this all go well.

Microsoft Technet had a rundown of how to backup and restore the metabase and this post from IT Solutions KB even includes screenshots of the process. All in all, the whole process took less than 10 steps, including making the initial backup. I was pleasantly surprised, since I expected IIS to be far more complex. I understand that IIS 7.0 is even easier, but I doubt it'll make me what to deal with IIS regularly!