On Wed, Dec 15, 2021 at 1:12 PM Estevan Rech <softrech@gmail.com> wrote:
Related to this is the backup service that seems to me that in a disaster, I can restore the database relatively quickly if it's in the database. On the disk, I believe that the restoration is much slower and I don't think it's reliable that all the images are copied/restored.
Everything ends up "on disk" at some point - whether it's a database or a simple file server - so speed and reliability would generally be a wash conceptually.
Honestly, with that more complete description (and the assumption these images are primary work products that are being paid for), I would say you should be doing both. Use something like AWS S3 to store a copy - saving its path into the DB as metadata - while also leaving a copy within the database. As mentioned nearby, also generate a hash and store that. Institute a rule that once an image has been generated it is never altered. If you need to deal with editing, create a new record, and maybe record the "source image hash" so you can build a chain if desired.
I'd probably store the image data on a separate table than the metadata - in a one-to-one relationship. Maybe even partition the image file table. That lets you drop images from the DB if desired - with the option to restore them from the AWS S3 system if needed. You can over-engineer things this way but I do think that having two primary sources for the images, plus their backups, is reasonable for the types of images you are dealing with.
