MsDeploy 3.5 automatic backup creates zip files lacking the Contents directory

Question

I am using the Web Deploy 3.5 tool to deploy our .NET 4.0 WCF web service (with the help of PackageWeb nuget). We have two "Windows Server 2008-R2" servers that are being used to test drive Web Deploy: QA and Staging. Both servers are configured to create up to 20 automatic backups (per application) during deployments. For some reason our Staging server generates backup ZIP files that only contain two files:

• archive.xml
• systemInfo.xml

The "Contents" directory is not there and there is no error being logged in Windows Event Logs. What's worse is that the servers are configured to not continue up on backup failure (continueSyncOnBackupFailure="false") but this obvious failure to add the Contents directory is seemingly not regarded as an error by the tool, so the tool happily continues to deploy the package.

Also, the archive.xml is somewhat deficient as it contains just this info:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<MSDeploy.Backup/>

My PC and both servers have Web Deploy 3.5 installed via Platform Installer. The deployment user account is an administrative account (Active Directory user on the QA server and a local user on Staging). The QA server also has "Web Deployment Tool 2.1" installed before 3.5.

Without a meaningful logging and abundant manuals there is not much to go by. I am hoping that this is something someone had resolved in the past. Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

I recently had this, I looked up each of the parameters in my command and found the problem was that I had this in the command:

-disableLink:ContentExtension

This was turning off the Content being backed up.

You can read more about the various parameters from Technet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/dd569089%28v=ws.10%29.aspx