Fun with Remote Blob Storage and SharePoint 2010

If you haven’t heard, SharePoint 2010 allows you to use FileStream from SQL Server 2008/2008 R2 and the Remote Blob Storage provider so that that you can now use cheap storage to store documents outside of SQL Server!

These articles were especially helpful in getting this working:

https://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2010/03/24/faq-sharepoint-2010-remote-blob-storage-rbs.aspx

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663474(office.14).aspx

https://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=174

SQL Server saves all of the blobs in an NTFS directory of your choosing:

For fault tolerance you would want this to be a shared drive on a SAN that is shared between the nodes in the Windows cluster.

Here are some additional points to keep in mind:

1) These files are not encrypted by default. If you take a file and change the file extension to the appropriate type (PDF, DOCX, etc.), an administrator will be able to view it.

2) If you delete a BLOB in the file system, SharePoint will return a 404 error when you attempt to open the file, but the icon will still show up in the document library.

3) If an administrator attempts to modify the file outside of SharePoint, Office will report that the file is corrupt but it will still open as a new file.