Size Limitations in Sharepoint 2013

Question

I am totally new to sharepoint so please be patient with me.

A company that lost a contract for my company’s customer had created a system that contained around 2 or 3 TB of files. Unfortunately, the customer did NOT put in the contract that the system that contained the files was their property so they were only able to get the files themselves. Those files were moved to a different sub-contractor’s control. The security was compromised so the files had to be quickly moved somewhere else. The company I work for already had SharePoint 2013 so they moved all the files to SharePoint for the customer. Because SharePoint has a 200 GB limit per site (otherwise you have problems), the files before a certain date had to be put into an archive. The archive files do show up on SharePoint but can’t be successfully searched. The newer files were put into a SharePoint site also. The newer files that aren’t archived can be searched, etc. However, search does not work properly for the archived files so any search needs have to be painstakingly done manually, which is quite tedious and time consuming. Because of the sheer size requirements to store all the files and the size limitations of SharePoint, it may not be the best tool to use. However, the customer does NOT want to spend a lot of money so we have to find a way to make SharePoint work. I have been given the task. I have no previous experience whatsoever with SharePoint. We do have a SharePoint Team of people who do. However, they are in a different group within the company and are not very willing to spend a lot of time on this task. Basically, we have to determine what needs to be done and then send a request for them to do it. So they don’t really work as closely with us as I would like. They know how to create and run PowerShell scripts to do things in SharePoint. I have Site Administrator privileges on the development environment so I can do quite a bit if I know what needs to be done and how to do it. I need to know if there is a good way to put the files into SharePoint so that size limitation will not be a problem and all the files can be searched, rather than being forced to archive a majority of the files. There are many groupings and sub-groupings of files. The files also contain metadata but entering that metadata manually would be way too time consuming. I have been tasked with finding the quickest and easiest way to put all the files into SharePoint so they are all as searchable as possible. The technical person who passed this task on to me told me that the only solution he can think of is to create a new SharePoint farm, then divide all the files into many separate site collections of less than 150 GB. However, if the size of a site grows over time it could become larger than 200 GB. I am surprised that SharePoint can’t handle sites that contain more than 200 GB without problems but that’s what I have been told. Before I start down a certain path I need to find out what the best solution to the problem is from somebody who knows enough about SharePoint that can give me some good possible solutions. This task is very high profile so I am under quite a bit of pressure to figure things out and get it done. Any information, suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Because SharePoint has a 200 GB limit per site (otherwise you have problems), the files before a certain date had to be put into an archive.

This hasn't been true for many years. You should read through https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt493258%28v=office.16%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396#ContentDB. Databases of 1TB+ are easy to manage given the correct backup strategies are in place and disk IOPS available.

Answer 2

Please refer to this article about SharePoint limitations, this will answer your questions:

Software boundaries and limits for SharePoint 2013

Answer 3

The 200GB mark is a guideline rather than a limit, with the background that databases over 200GB may cause issues with a backup/restore (time-outs) scenarios (so like Trevor said, depends on your backup strategies).

As far as is know crossing the 200GB limit will put the database in a state which will not be supported by Microsoft in case of issues. (This is the recent status i know about)

If you don't require Microsoft support for that specific db, you can put all those files in one db.

Answer 4

Most of the current answers move around the question "How big can a SharePoint database get?"...

But your problem seems different to me: You want to make some TB of content searchable in SharePoint.

Why not simply putting those files on a file-server and crawling them in SharePoint? This will save lots of hassle regarding database-sizes, library-limits, library-structures, etc. But it also has limitations like no preview with an OfficeOnline-Server and no chance to add metadata to the documents.