title: Archiving large amounts of old data in SQL Server
body: <p>Pretty simple question.</p>
  
  <p>I have a large 70gb database that has four of five tables that contain about 50 million rows each.  These tables contain about 6 years worth of data.  We are limited to amount of space in our database to 80gb, and we are going to be quickly approaching that in the next 6 months or so.</p>
  
  <p>We only need to keep about two years worth of data in the live database.  What is the best approach to archiving the older data WITHOUT taking the live database offline (it's 24/7 database)?</p>
  
  <p>We are running SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard in a clustered environment using active-passive setup using shared storage.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>