OK. I appreciate all the help you guys/gals are giving me in answering what must be stupid questions.

Anything special I need to know about doing it, O Master of the short answer? LOL! 🙂

Do the table bulk copies during a snapshot temporarily lock up the tables? Perhaps that is why a downtime would be preferable.

Then why would someone have told me that I will require a downtime to setup replication?

Nope, just one subscriber.

Thank you! I will start there.

I believe I've been able to skirt this issue for now and have gone ahead and use a snaphot for the 40 tables in question. It seems to be working,...

Another question,

If it takes three hours to run a full backup my db, and three hours to restore it to the subscriber, how do I ensure that my initializing transaction...

So if my subscribing db only has the 40 tables that I need replicated (via transactional replication), and I make sure no one is making any more changes to the...

I'm only able to initialize replication with the backup method. It is the recommended method as per our vendor documentation.

OK, so what is the recommended method for stopping/pausing replication for the duration of the maintenance event? What is the recommended method for restarting it?