Transactional Replication Reinitialize I'm using SQL Server transactional replication and looking for ideas on reducing the amount of downtime caused by re-initializing subscriptions.

I have multiple publishers pushing data to a single subscriber across the WAN.  I recently had to recover the subscriber from backup.  Upon restoring the backup, the subscriber was out of sync with all of the publishers.  The only way I knew to get the subscriber back in sync with all of the publishers was to re-initialize all the subscriptions.

Since the publishers and subscriber are separated by a WAN connection, this process was extremely time consuming.  In some cases it takes 24+ hours to generate a snapshot.  

Any ideas on how to reduce the downtime caused by this type of scenario?  The only idea I have at this point is to use Always On with the subscriber.
Whether you use a backup or a snapshot, you need to routinely pre-stage the data needed for reinitialization near the subscriber.  The goal is to always  have a backup/snapshot that is within the Distribution Retention Period, and close to the subscriber.

Also whenever you are using a snapshot to initialize a remote subscriber, it's better to copy the snapshot local and use an Alternate Snapshot Location.

Also note that if you have a single subscriber database with multiple subscriptions, you can't initialize from a backup.