I have one small suggestion. I dont know if it will meet your criteria or not.

Set up a read only Transactional replication to your report server. In that transactional replication, set it up not to propagate the delete commands (I read it here in SSC that you can ignore delete commands that is done in publisher to hit the subscriber). Then delete the records from your production server instead of moving to Archive DB since the report server can act as the Archive DB.

Please forgive my ignorance if I am totally wrong.... 🙂