Newbie Question

I'm kind of a newbie to MS SQL. I've been using it for a while but mostly
from a programmer's perspective. I now have to manage a SQL server that is
at a remote location. I want to replicate data from the remote production
server to our office server.
The data is to big to export (or backup) and download over the our
connection as single files nightly so I my thought is that I could
innitially synchronise the servers over the course of a few days by just
exporting from one server to another. That should at least give me a
baseline to work with. I'm still working on that as I keep running into
bugs that kill the export part way through.
My questions are:
1. Is there a better way to do my initial export for a baseline? Should I
just backup the full database to a file and get it shipped to me somehow to
establish my baseline to work with.
2. Is there a facility in MS SQL that will allow me to do a Master/Slave
replication? Basically nightly synchronise any new or changed data to the
slave office server from the remote production server.
Looking for ideas, direction to get started, what to search for, or products
built for this task. I'm certain there are 3'rd party products for this but
I'd like to keep this as inexpensive as possible.
For this scenario I'd investigate Log Shipping. There are alternatives
(Database Mirroring and Transactional Replication) but Log Shipping would
probably be best (see http://www.replicationanswers.com/Standby.asp).
Cheers,
Paul Ibison SQL Server MVP, www.replicationanswers.com
(recommended sql server 2000 replication book:
http://www.nwsu.com/0974973602p.html)