Topology:
Sharpoint 2003, 1 SQL, 1 web&search and 1 index server, plus seperate
wss archive server.

My client archives his 'old' documents to seperate wss sites. They use sps to
crawl the content of these websites. Currently there are
over 2 miljn documents in these archives (6 wss sites). Every year they open a
new archive. Last week the index was broken and fully rebuilding took more then
a week.

My questions:
1) I believe it is better to have 6 or so seperate indexes (one per
website) so in case of emergency, one can easly rebuild according to
priority. Do you agree?
2) Can we backup the index (gatherer files) in some way so that we can do
incremental rebuilding after a restore?
3) Do you have any links to related whitepapers or blogs