Andy,
One of the nice things about having two DCs in your domain is that you now
have redundancy. If one of your DCs goes down ( hardware issues, for
example ) you still have a good copy of your AD on the remaining DC ( TIP:
the AD is actually contained inside the file ntds.dit ). All you would
typically need to do would be to have another WIN2000 Server and run dcpromo
on it to promote it to a DC and then let synchronization takes place.
Bingo! You now have two DCs again. I say typically because it depends on
what happened at the timing of the downed DC.
However, to answer your question directly - you should back up the System
State. You can do this with the built-in NTBackup or you could use some
third-party software ( like Veritas ).
HTH,
Cary
