Almost forgot... at my previous job, the archive process ran nightly. At my current job, it runs on Monday and Thursday nights. First run may take a day or more to complete, but it's online all the time. After that, the daily jobs (same as the first job) are a piece of cake and may only take a couple of seconds to execute depending, of course, how many rows slip past your cutoff date on any given day.

Some folks have suggested that such a thing be built into a trigger... past experience tells me that will eventually turn out to be a source of deadlocks on high volume systems.