Yesterday we noticed on our production database that replication did not run anymore because of an error in one record. This forced us to re-iniitalize the subscription. Maybe this is exactly what we should not have done but we did . The result was that production stopped because of the first part of the replication to dump all the tables and make new empty ones. The problem is that this does not seem a good idea for a slow connection between 2 machines. Better would be that we could just restart the replication from a backup but as far as I know this is not possible.

So my question is now what can we do to speed up the replication if there is no way that we can improve the line quality. (One server is in NL and the other in CN, and as everybody know there is the great big firewall in Bejing which controlls all the internet traffic. )

Is there a way to prevent replication from emptying the tables and fill them again.

Many thanks Peter Kaldenberg

If you re-initialized the subscription the again  a new snapshot will be create. This means you are setup the replication from scratch. Now you want to speedup this process. There could be number of reason for this slowness. collect stats of the server and check.