stdout stands for STanDard OUTput. Programs have 3 standard IO streams: stdin (input), stdout (output), stderr (error messages & informational output when you don't want to mix it with whatever's going to stdout).
dom3 prints log to stdout, so the stdout file you had was probably a log full of it whining about something going wrong.
If you aren't doing backups yet, you really should start doing so. I've posted a relatively sane backup script in the
Linux Admining thread. You should be able to adapt it to DOS syntax relatively easily. Or just use it directly with Cygwin. You'll just need to set the dominions3 directory in the latter case.
Or roll your own. But backup
