Big Image Storage: Blobs in DB or Files on Server - experiences / solutions?

Question

I reached about 1 GB in images in my qa_blobs table.

I like the flexibility with one of my plugins (image manager) to search for false uploads, unused uploads and remove those images. Plus I can quickly rotate images by PHP.

But there is one problem: My host provider can obviously not handle backups of databases greater than 1 GB. The backups fail from time to time (not always).

So I am considering transfering the images from the db table to the file system.

The disadvantage I see is the backup then, because I need to copy ALL files by FTP to my home pc or i run a ZIP php script but I could bet that it fails due to the size!

My question: What is your experience on the image storage? Do you have any idea how I can handle this?

Note: I do not want to use an image hoster. I want to be in full control of my content.

Comments

One option would be the command line program rsync. You can run that every few days or weeks and it will only download the new images.

Answer 1

Using MySQLDumper you can create mysql backup. 

If you want to store your images from outsite DB then

1. Create a folder named "images" on where you install Q2A 

2. Add this line on config.php define('QA_BLOBS_DIRECTORY', 'images');

3. Go to yoursite/admin/stats

4. Blobs To Disk