We've had a catastrophic failure on our publishing database which has wiped the entire database from existence. (Completely inexplicable). For various reasons relating to some bizzare decisions by a previous vendor, the failure of the publisher has gone unnoticed until today when identity column constraints started being violated.
This means that any backup of the publisher database is well out of date from the subscriber and we need to consider the surviving subscriber as the master set of data.
My question is, what is the best process to re-establish the publisher from a subscriber (backup?). My thinking was to backup the subscriber, wipe all the replication subscriptions (if I can), back-up again, then move the backup file to the publisher host, restore the database, and configure the replication from scratch again... will this work? (Due to the distance between the hosts and the size of the database that has to be moved, I was hoping for some guidance before I chew up various traffic allowances with the data shift.
P.