IIS Backup is essential

[Shane Melson]

A point of extreme caution and importance in this case is that You will need to take backups of the sites on the IIS prior to initialising any uninstall or re-install procedures on the server.

Backing up the sites can be done as follows:

1. Open IIS manager
2. Right Click on the server name (the second tab in IIS manager screen)
3. Go to All Tasks - Backup and Restore - Create - Type the name of backups here (preferably a dated name) - start
This will take a few minutes depending on the number of sites on the server.
4. Once this is complete, you can go ahead with the uninstall and re-install without any doubts.

Restoring a backup

1. Open IIS manager
2. Right Click on the server name (the second tab in IIS manager screen)
3. Go to All Tasks - Backup and Restore - Select the backup you created in the above process - Restore
It will again take quite a while to complete the restore process.
4. Once done, you may require to restart IIS (not always but it does become neccessary sometimes). do it as follows:
go to comand prompt, and type iisreset /restart
5. Thats it, you can see all the original sites and configuratiosn backonline without problems.