Database replication (NAV 2009 Classic / SQL 2008)

I'm new to using NAV/SQL replication, we have several replicated databases, these are mostly for reporting purpouses, and one is for a remote location, I have searched the forum but have not found anything specific (basic) to my two questions, which are the following:

1) For reporting, is it really necessary to have a replicated (real-time) NAV (SQL 2008) db? Would having an automated script to copy the db during off-hours accomplish the same thing? I'm thinking that since we really don't need real-time reporting, there is un-nessary updates to the replicated db and possibly performance issues.

2) For our remote location, it's basically the same operations, they do write-transactions to the database which gets replicated, I guess this was set-up so that the remote location would continue to use NAV in case of a downed communications line, we very rarely experience this, would it make more sense to just have those remote users remote connect to the corp. database and not do replication? Could this contribute to some lock/integrity of data when doing process intensive transactions?