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System State Restore - Advanced Topics
?Recovering system state to a domain controller
The pertinent information here, straight from Microsoft's site:
"If you are restoring the System State data to a domain controller, you must choose whether you want to perform an authoritative restore or a nonauthoritative restore The default method of restoring the System State data to a domain controller is nonauthoritative. In this mode, any component of the System State that is replicated with another domain controller, such as the Active Directory directory service or the File Replication service (including the SYSVOL directory), will be brought up to date by replication after you restore the data. For example, if the last backup was performed a week ago, and the System State is restored using the default restore method (nonauthoritative), any changes made subsequent to the backup operation will be replicated from the domain controllers."
Read the following article carefully if restoring within Active Directory, on a domain controller:
Authoritative Restore of Active Directory and Impact on Trusts and Computer Accounts
The Authoritative Restore feature allows an administrator to select specific objects or subtrees of objects from an archived Active Directory database and restore them to a domain controller. Note that doing so causes Active Directory replication to replicate this restored state (the System State) of objects, overwriting the copies currently held on all domain controllers within the domain. The restored objects receive a USN greater than the current set of domain objects.
For more information about the Authoritative Restore process, see the "Authoritative Restore" topic in Windows Backup Help.
Non-authoritative System-State restore
If a nonauthoritative restore is performed by using the Windows Backup utility, the domain controller will contain the settings and entries that existed in the Domain, Schema, Configuration, and optionally the Global Catalog Naming Contexts when the backup was performed. Partial synchronization (replication) from other replicas within the enterprise then update all naming contexts hosted on the domain controller, overwriting the restored data. For more information on authorative restore read article in Microsoft Knowledge Base.
Useful shelf life of a system-state backup of Active Directory
Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 do not allow the restoring of old backup images into a replicated enterprise. Specifically, the useful life of a backup is the same as the "tombstone lifetime" setting for the enterprise. The default value for the tombstone lifetime entry is 60 days. This value can be set on the Directory Service (NTDS) config object. For more information. | 
