I'm responsible for a large site collection which functions as an electronic filing system. After 1.5 years of use, the content database is now at 750+ GB (and growing), so I'm concerned about optimization & future overhead.
Here are the basics of the system:
- Multiple lists with cross-linked lookup fields & relationships
- Multiple libraries associated/linked with each list item
- Multiple files in each library, some as large as 1GB (AutoCAD files)
- Most files are frequently used/updated on an ongoing basis (living documents)
- Currently no way to break the site up into multiple collections
What would be the best ways to maintain a system like this? We've ruled out moving to a SQL application, it needs to stay in SharePoint. We've also ruled out keeping the files on a network/SAN drive, management wants them IN SharePoint.
I'm hoping maybe there's a way to "archive" some of this so that it moves into a different content database at the end of the lifecycle. Or, failing that, maybe just a way to break up the bulk into smaller pieces.
Note: Everything is working at the moment, I'm just trying to cut off any issues at the pass. I dread the day that the site is down and we're waiting on a 1TB database backup to restore.
Farm Specs: This is currently running SP2013 on a 4-server farm (2 WFE, 2 APP) with a clustered SQL 2012 instance for the backend. Farm performance isn't generally a problem (yet).