SQL Server synchronization with cutoff

I have a production DB (running on SQL Server 2008) with some ever-growing tables (orders etc). These tables are large and keep growing, so I want to make a cutoff at some point, but naturally, I do not want to lose the history entirely. So, I thought along the lines of:

One time: Backup the entire DB to another server

Periodically:

1. Back up differentially / synchronize from Production DB to Backup DB
2. In Production DB, delete all rows older the cutoff period

This would not, of course, replace the regular backup plan of the production server, but rather would allow shrinking its size while keeping the historical data available off-site, where I can use it for statistics and whatnot.

Does this make sense? And if it does, could you point me towards some solution / tool which allow this, other than manually writing code for EACH of the ever-growing tables.

A开发者_StackOverflow中文版ny advice will be appreciated.

Micky

May be partioning will help you.
It helps you to split table on different datafiles and filegroups. You can backup and restore each partition independenly.