File Storage Discussion

[ferrosti]

I am trying to gain some pros/cons for file storage in FS or in DB. The problem is that my DB already is at nearly 70GB with attachments stored in it. I have had two myISAM crashes in the past year due the matter, that the connection to my NFS filer broke away. A myisamchk took me almost 2h the last time (already optimized parms).
I see a problem storing these files on disk when it comes to backup. OTRS stores plenty of files to disk which contain meta-data of a very small size. Given my actual DB size I do not think that I could do a full backup during an acceptable time-slot.

Comments welcome

[crythias]

It sounds to me like FS storage is completely pro because you can incrementally back up the files as they're dropped, as opposed to full backups of the db...

[ferrosti]

I tried it on one of my testing environments and it worked fine when opening tickets by piping mailfiles to otrs.PostMaster.pl (as root). For some reason I had lots of trouble doing this automatically or as OTRS user.
Background is that I got OTRS and mySQL running in a VM, whilst the mySQL data path resides in an NFS mount. I want the /opt/otrs/var path to be symlinked to the NFS mount, since disk I/O in a VMWare is a mess and I do not want to open another partition in our SAN for it.

We do full backups once a week and incremental backups every night. So this problem would still exist.

For me it seemed like at first apache had trouble to follow symlinks, which needs to be enabled. Afterwards I had some issues due to file permissions. Files were written to disk, but when opening a ticket it threw error messages like hell. For security reasons I want my OTRS and apache users not to be the same, but I put OTRS to the group of my apache (its 'www' on SuSE). Still I had no luck.

Another thing I have experienced is that metadata which has been written to files is also available from DB. Why is that?

Maybe I should give it another try, but I must say its been a pain in the ass.