Document Management System - Where to Store Files?

I'm on charge of building an ASP.NET MVC Document Management System. It have to be able to do basic document management tasks like adding, editing and searching entries and also perform versioning.

Anyways, I'm targeting PDF, O开发者_StackOverflow中文版ffice and many image formats as the file attached to each document entry in the database. My question is: What design guidelines do pros follow when building the storage mechanism? Do they store the document files in the file system? Database? How file uploading is handled?

I used to upload the files to a temporal location while the user was editing the data and move it to permanent storage when the user confirmed the entry creation. Is this good? Any suggestions on improvement?

Files should generally be stored on a filesystem, rather than a database.

You will, however, have to consider some other things:

• Are you planning on ever supporting load-balancing, replication, etc for your system?

  If so, you'll need to support saving / loading files from a network location of some sort.
  This can be trickier than you may imagine.

• Are you planning to secure access to the files?

  If so, you'll need to ensure they can't be read by someone who happens to know the URL. eg: by returning the file as an attachment to a request.

  This also prevents user-provided files being executed on your server - eg someone uploading an .aspx or .exe file and then accessing it.