Distribution Transaction Retention

I currently have a simple transactional replication setup for a database. My publisher and distributor are on the same box. The subscription is setup using a push agent.

My question is related to recovery of the subscriber.

So lets say replication is setup and working fine. Suddenly we had a failure on the subscriber database. Now I could just reconfigure the subscription, and the subscribing database would be back up and good to go, but the problem is that over time, we have made some changes to the subscribing database that are not made in the publisher. For example, the tables have different indexes. Just reconfiguring the subscritpion would not recover these objects.

So I have to acutally restore the subscriber database. So I do that, and apply transaction logs up to the most recent transaction log backup. Now, consider that my transaction log backups on the subscriber happen every 4 hours, and the most recent transaction log backup I had was from 3 hours ago. So now at this point, my subscribing database is 3 hours behind my publisher.

Now, will the distribution agent resend the missing 3 hours of transactions?

In the distribution agent properties, there are two settings for transaction retention, "at least" and "but not more than". Currently they set to 0 and 72 hours respectivly. Now I would assume that if I set the "at least" setting to the subscriber transaction log backup period, in this case 4 hours, I would be covered, and the distribution agent would indeed re-replication the transactions that happend since the recovery point 3 hours.

I just wanted to verify that this is acutally what these settings are refering too, and that if I set the "at least" setting to 4 hours, I would be covered.

- Eric