Thus far, we have limited our use of the media tab to photos and newspaper articles etc.  However, our research department is pushing to start saving other documents in order to move to a paperless office.  It seems to be the consensus from other users that that practice would be a grossly inappropriate use of disk space within RE, and that embedding links on the Media tab also has drawbacks with issues of broken links, etc.  I also noted some comments about there are space issues even for individual documents when embeding them on the Media tab.

We are wondering what how far anyone has actually pushed the space limits and what those limits are.  How have others addressed these issues?

I do not remember if it was here or on the Blackbaud User Society website (www.blackbus.org) but Shaun Sullivan posted an opinion on the use of the Media Tab and the facts and myths about imbedding documents into RE.  Search past posts here and there and maybe you'll find it.

From what I remember (not being the God of a Blackbaud Chief Technology Officer that is Shaun Sulivan) is that the way it works should not cause any slow down of your database to add in madia objects but you are limited by the size of your server.  By imbedding them they go on your RE server rather than on whatever network server you would normally kept them in.  I believe that they take up no more or less space but it is just space needed on a different server which some people do not have.

While I'm no Shaun Sullivan  I think I did find something that would be useful to this discussion in Knowledgebase solution BB117656. Here's what it says:

Advantages to storing links rather than files:

• Data entry time is less per item, a significant difference because the only way to add photos is through manual entry.
  
• JPEG or BMP files, used for photos, can be 30KB or so each. Multiply that number by several hundred constituents. Not storing these large files inside the database keeps the overall database size down.

Since this is the second recent discussion on the Media tab, I'll write something about it on The User's Edge blog this week.

Hope this helps!

That seems to actually be the opposite advice to Shaun.  If you have the server space I seem to recall him recommending imbedding the media images.

You're right, Melissa - it's all about what version of SQL you're using.  MSDE and SQL Express limit database size to 2 GB and 4 GB respectively - if that's all the room you have to work with, you're probably better off embedding links.  If you're running SQL 2000 Standard or Enterprise, your database can be up to 1 TB; SQL 2005 Standard and Enterprise have no limit on database size.  If you have that much room to work with, embedding the files themselves is best.