Thanks for the suggestion Roy. I did try this to start with but the publication started generating lots of articles which is the part of the process that took a long time. I'm not very familiar with replication, so I probably did something wrong. Also the tutorials which I could find all related to using a default configuration (push subscription, local distributor), whereas I wanted to use a remote distribution database (on the reporting server) and set up a pull subscripton. I'm sure that given time and a suitable test environment, I could have got it working, unfortunately I had neither of these luxuries. I eventually settled for sharing the backups volume of the live system with the reporting server and configuring an overnight restore job to restore the reporting database from the live server. Not an ideal solution but an acceptable one.