I have a 180GB MOSS 2007 database whose maintenance (i.e. backups and restores) are becoming a problem. Part of the issue can be resolved by splitting the three content sites down into their own site collections, however this will likely still leave me with a 100gb DB to deal with. Whilst this isnt entirely problematic for SQL it does mean that backups / restores take far too long.

my idea is to split each of the databases to 30gb files, then to import the content into them which should distribute the content across the file groups,making it much easier / faster to backup/restore.

Is there a way to backup from a single file and restore to a filegroup?

If i have the wrong understanding of filegroups then I'm more than happy to find out other methods of managing the size of databases.