I have not been able to find a simple way to copy all of my Windows Server 2008 settings. Theses are the bits and pieces I have found:

Copy IIS7 Configuration

To save IIS 7 (Internet Information Services) configuration, copy the config directory %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\inetsrv\config, example:

[code]xcopy %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\inetsrv\config c:\backup\iisconfig\ /S/E[/code]

Windows Advanced Firewall Export Configuration

To export all the current configurations of your firewall to a file:

[code]netsh advfirewall export c:\backup\advfirewall.wfw[/code]

Source: David Davis

Export Windows Registry

To export the Registry, use regedit.exe command line options. Note that export is done in background so you need to allow some time before you are able to access the exported file.

[code]regedit /e c:\backup\regbackup.reg[/code]

Source: Speedguide

Network Settings

[code]netsh dump > c:\backup\network-settings-netsh-dump.txt[/code]

Source: Chris Sanders

Please note that this method cannot and should not to be compared to a full backup method such as Windows Server Backup.

This method will not allow you to do a full recovery. It will mean installing Windows Server and all software from scratch and then recover the data you have backed up. Meaning an unrecoverable hard drive crash would most likely mean more downtime/recovery time.

The reason I like this method is because it takes less space which allows me to use S3 to save my backups. That means I can fully automate it (scheduled batch script and no need to change any media) and it is off-site (meaning if there is a fire where my server is, my backup is still safe). And I prefer the ease of just getting my files from a zip file if I need to check or recover anything. Besides, it’s dirt cheap, I pay Amazon S3 a few dollars for a month worth of daily 1GB backups.

However what I did not realize until today is that (at least in my Windows installation) the group IIS_IUSRS does not have any group members but I should instead give the user IUSR permissions. Too easy…
So simply do this: give user IUSR Modify and Write permissions to your WordPress directory.

Finally!

After a lot of googling and testing I finally found Bruce Kirkpatrick’s comment at the end of the PHP install manual

Seems it is no longer enough to have localhost in the servers local hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) you also have to comment out or remove the IPv6 equivalent.

127.0.0.1 localhost
#::1 localhost

After I did this everything worked ok again. Thanks Bruce!

Problem

I just upgraded PHP on my Windows Server 2008 running IIS7 from PHP 5.2.10 to 5.3.1. Used the non-threaded install package and installed for FastCGI.

After the upgrade installation worked fine for some non-database driven pages and phpinfo worked fine but whenever a page tries to accessed the MySQL database the browser only gave me a 500 Internal Server Error.

Checking the php error log (C:\Windows\Temp\php-errors.log) I get messages like this:

[24-Feb-2010 13:44:36] PHP Warning: mysql_connect() [<a href='function.mysql-connect'>function.mysql-connect</a>]: [2002] A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not (trying to connect via tcp://localhost:3306) in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\XXX\init_page.inc on line 32
[24-Feb-2010 13:44:36] PHP Warning: mysql_connect() [<a href='function.mysql-connect'>function.mysql-connect</a>]: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.
in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\XXX\init_page.inc on line 32
[24-Feb-2010 13:44:36] PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\XXX\init_page.inc on line 32