To add to what Ed posted...

I went through this about a year ago with telephone call recordings. I, too, was well aware of storing larger files on disk instead of the database. To wit, most of the calls were geater than 1MB and I was determined to get them out of my database.

I'm not sure why they did it but they stored the file in both places and also stored the file path in the database. Being the diligent pendant that I am, I wrote some code to verify that all of the files existed and {drum role please} they did NOT all exist. That led me to the following conclusion.

No one protects data better than a DBA and his/her backups. Files can be touched by too many people and the DBA has no control over when or even if those files get backed up. Despite the performance hit and the need to do partitioning to accomodate the growing backup requirements, I'll take the performance hit and all of the work to keep those call recordings in the database because it would appear (another drum roll, please} that's the only place where I can guarantee that they won't disappear or get lost.