There are times we will need to move/merge IIS Web Server/Services to another machine. Copying files are easy, but copying configurations are not, as they are stored in the Windows NT Metabase.

There are tools for Windows 2000 Servers and Windows 2003 Servers to Sync, Backup, and Restore Web Configurations. These tools are the vbs files stored in %SystemRoot%system32inetsrv subfolders, or %SystemRoot%System32 sub-folders.
For Windows 2000 Server, or IIS 5.0, %systemroot%system32inetsrviissync.exe will do the job. The command is: iissync computername. Where computername is the computer you want to move the configurations to.

For Windows 2003 Server, or iis 6.0, You have more options to do the more complicated task like merge metabase, etc. But the simplest one is to backup the metabase from the old, , copy the backed up files to the new, and restore the metabase to the new.

To backup the configurations, go to %systemroot%system32, then do: iisback /backup.
This will backup the metabase to a file called SampleBackup under %systemroot%system32inetsrvMetaBack. The file name are called SampleBackup.md0 and SampleBackup.sc0. For more options, type iisback /backup /?
Now, before you restore, you will need to move all these SampleBackup files to the new machine, and put them into the sample place.

Once they are there, you do:

iisback /restore /b SampleBackup

This should do. for more options, please use iisback /restore /?

This is the easiest and the fastest, but since it is just a complete metabase copy from the source to the destination, you’d better edit the backed up SampleBackup files, to change the machine names at least, before you restore.

There are more sophisticated ones to merge two or more metabases together. The command line is called iiscnfg.vbs. It is also located under %systemroot%system32.