I am planning to archive and purge a lot of data from a larger[er] production database. I am asking for opinions based on experience of doing something similar. My thoughts are that since approximately 40 GB of data will be moved out of a 105 GB database that is normally in FULL recovery mode, it might be quicker to take a full backup, change the database to either simple or bulk-logged mode, run all the processes that move/purge the data then at the completion change the database backup to FULL recovery mode and take another full backup.
I tried changing it to simple mode for a similar situation on a test server/database and the log file still got filled up.
Would it work better to use bulk-logged mode or just leave it in full mode and continue to backup the log every 10 minutes? I'm just trying to find a way to speed it up a bit. It would also be good to minimize the log file growth and tempdb growth.
Any thoughts will be appreciated.