AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I noticed that after a product is deleted, it no longer shows up in sales reports. Therefore, I don't want to actually delete products. So I need some good best practices for archiving them.

I'm thinking it would be good to privatize the product, orphan it, delete its related images, disable purchasing, and disable inventory tracking. Perhaps instead of orphaning the product, I should create a private category of "old products", and just move it to that category.

Any thoughts?