Anders Pedersen has a script to archive data in smaller batches:
Seeing as the data had to be retrievable for any date, I could not simply delete the very old data. These tables also had constant inserts and updates into them, so making sure the tables remained available became important, i.e. needed to have acceptable time that the table was being locked, with time for waiting transactions to finish.
The solution I came up with does this with variable size batches. Now, with modern versions of SQL, there are other ways to do this, but the good thing about this method it works regardless of version of SQL, as well as edition. Azure SQL DB would need some modification to make it work to archive to a separate database.
Click through for the script.