From: "T. Koray Peksayar"
NT/2000 exists. Check out Arkeia. It's Linux version is distributed with SuSE.
The biggest problem I see is that there is a MS SQL server on the Win 2000. :) Not a big problem. What you get paying 100's of $$$ is a RDBMS which is too slow thus can't even properly display its interface.
Try out MySQL. It rocks both on Win and Linux !
I believe that it would be possible to collect data from Windows using Samba tools. But I have no idea how to backup a MS SQL database.
Yeah this can be done. MS SQL has its internal backup system. So you can copy those backup files to anywhere you want.