>The database was created before I arrived. It is a very complicated database, and also a very poorly designed one in many areas. At this time my aim is to replicate to the backup server to automate that proccess (as opposed to manually copying backup files several times a day). Efforts to imporve / modify the database design must be done carefully as it is in full production. This would include changing the 'Not For Replication' flags on the tables to true.
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>I know that setting that flag would preserve the index numbering, but would not setting it precude the replication of the tables? I had not thought that.

You might want to look at the timestamp data type. Assuming SQL Server 2000, the timestamp uniquely identifies records and is treated as a binary. It's the same size as a datetime, but shouldn't be used for that purpose. The only other thing that I know of would be to create a GUID for the parent record and make that the foreign key. The bad thing about a GUID is that they're larger (16 bytes), and thus could negatively impact performance.