How to delete a large website within a Magento Store?

Question

I've a reasonably large Magento instance that holds two websites: a retail site and a wholesale site.

For business reasons I need to split these into two separate instances, preserving the full order history and product catalogues of each one as I do so but deleting (or at least hiding) the records that relate to the other store.

I thought that simply cloning the site to a second instance, changing the default store and then using the UI to delete the appropriate store in each would be the simplest way, however with 10,000 skus and 40,000 orders in the history deleting the sites fails - I've messed around with timeouts and even after running for an hour straight, cpu sitting on 100%, it still fails to delete the selected store.

Can anyone suggest a better strategy to do this? I'd thought of building up the two sites from scratch and importing products with Magmi, but that doesn't help with the customers and order histories and still leaves lots of other bits like CMS blocks/pages, tax settings, promotions that I'd need to pull in manually - so that becomes very messy.

Things to note about this scenario:

• Customers are unique to each store
• Most products are shared b/w stores
• Some CMS content is shared
• Config settings, shipping methods, tax etc are all very different per store

Answer 1

You should use your second suggestion and make new installs and import to them. That way you can use a newer Magento version, and keep things clean. You can get extensions for exporting and importing things like customers and customer history, orders, attributes, categories, etc. Most cost 50-100 so whatever you cant do manually you can just pay for a module. Or hire a professional to do everything for you.

You store is pretty big to move around so you need to do it piece by piece anyway. Just be methodical or hire someone to do it for you.