well if you are doing this to improve your understanding of how SQL works, I applaud you; sometimes reinventing the wheel can be a very rewarding experience education wise.

practically speaking, however, you'd usually use the built in tools SQL server can provide, for example replication, snapshot replication and mirroring, it really depends on your requirements.

you didn't really as a question...just made a statement on what you are planning to do; did you have a question or were looking for strategies?

triggers and linked servers are one way to do it; the way i've done it was by adding columns for last_updated to every table I cared to track, and the triggers to update that last_updated column during an UPDATE...then you can just scan for rows that have changed since the last time you synced them.

In my situation, we didn't need to track DELETED data, but I'd like to hear your strategy for when a row gets deleted...in or case we didn't want the changes propigated if deleted, so we kind of had the last updated value forever.

SQL has the new "upsert" ability using the MERGE command, that is naother option, and that would not require a trigger.