title: MS-SQL Server 2005: Initializing a merge subscription with alternate snapshot location
body: <p>We started some overseas merge replication 1 year ago and everything is going fine till now. My problem is that we have now so much data in our system that any crash on one of the subscriber's servers will be a disaster: reinitialising a subscription the standard way will take days (our connexions are definitely slow, but already very very expensive)! Among the ideas I have been following up are the following:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>make a copy of the original
  database, freeze it, send the files
  by plane to the subscriber, and
  initiate replication without
  snapshot: this is something that was
  done traditionnaly with older
  versions of SQL, but it sounds a
  little bit messy to me: I would have
  to put my publisher's data in
  read-only mode and stop all
  replications untill the operation is
  completed.</li>
  <li>make a snapshot of the data,
  send the snapshot files abroad,
  install them on the subscriber, and
  indicate the new snapshot location
  as an alternate location in the
  replication properties. This one
  sounds fair to me (no necessity to suspend ongoing replications, no data freeze), but, on this
  point, Microsoft help does not ...
  help.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I am sure some of you have already experienced such a situation. What was your choice?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: of course, one could say "Why don't you just give a try to your ideas", but it will take hours (multiple instances of sql-servers, virtual machines, and all that stuff...), and I was thinking that the guy who did it will need only 2 minutes to explain his idea. And I'd be the most happy man if someone accepts to loose 2 minutes of his time to spare me hours of hard work ...</p>