Best practice for IIS 6.0 (Windows Server 2003) backups?

What is the best backup strategy for saving IIS 6.0 data: web metadata, files, logs etc. for disaster recovery?

Solution 1:

We've been using the web deployment tool (aka msdeploy) to sync our main web server with our failover servers. It's great - it'll migrate permissions, IIS configuration, virtual directories, files, folders; in fact, we used it to mirror our main web server onto a fresh Windows 2008 box in about ten minutes, and it just worked - really impressive.

It's the best way we've found of capturing IIS files and configuration state.

Solution 2:

We use http://www.xs4all.nl/~edienske/abaktu/

It does excellent backups and is configured in 5 minutes in a small xml file.

We nightly dump the IIS XML config into a directory using Iisback.vbs

Check it out at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/5e7e923c-b374-4872-a8f5-da85ec1315fd.mspx?mfr=true