30 Hours to backup... are you going straight to tape? Take a look at a backup compression product like Litespeed (Quest), SQL Backup (Red Gate) or SQL Safe (Idera) with a backup straight to disk.

With a database that big, disk management is a big deal, things like filegroups can make your life much easier especially since the data does not change once written - data that does not change broken up into logical "chunks" is much easier to manage than volatile data.

With static data that breaks up easily (e.g. by month) partitioning is definitely an option as well.

Joe