How to decide where to store imaging items

Purpose

This article explains how to determine where you want to store your XCB imaging items.  It describes the pros and cons of different approaches.

Explanation

Xcb allows you to store your imaging items in two different locations:  on the web server, or in your database.   When you first have Xcb imaging installed, Xtheta support will ask you which location you prefer.  This article explains the pros and cons of each storage location.    Don't worry - you can change the storage location at any time.

Windows

pros

Easier 'one off' backups/purging of old images

They're just regular files so you can back up all the images for one department or customer just by copying a single folder. Likewise, you can also delete images for one department / client just by removing the client/department's folder

Easier movement to a larger drive or other server

Since the imaging items are stored as regular files, you can relocate them easily to a larger drive just by moving the files themselves and repointing Xcb to look at the new folder

Faster storage / retrieval

Since they aren't stored in the DB, Xcb doesn't need to do any special manipulation on the files to convert them to a format that can be manipulated easily; SO you can retrieve and store them a lot faster

Compression

Files that are stored on Windows are capable of getting compressed, so they end up taking 1/8th the size of files that are stored in the DB

Larger upper limit on number of files

The storage structure that's used on Windows means that we can store approximately 16.7 billion images for each individual one of of your customer codes.

cons

Additional location to back up

Since the images are stored outside the database, there's one more location that you need to remember to back up consistently.

Database

pros

Files are stored the same place as the rest of your data

You don't need to remember what other locations on your network to back up or restore

cons

No possibility of backing up images for just one customer/department

You must back up all images together since they're all stored in one giant chunk. you can't back up just the images for one client/department

No compression

We cannot compress images that get stored in the database. SO, they take up 8-10X the amount of space that they'd take on the Windows side (actually it's more like 16-20X because of inefficiencies in the way the 400 stores data that makes it explode in size)

Upper limit on file 'max size'

We can only store files less than 1MB in the DB; so there's a limit on the maximum size of files that can be uploaded to the system (on windows, the max size for a single image is 2TB)

Upper limit on number of files

We can only store up to 1TB worth of images total on the 400 side. Once we hit that limit, you cannot store any more images (even if you have plenty of free space).