Hi, My customer wants 'customer docs' in SharePoint. It is now stored on several disks and wants to move it to SharePoint 2007(!). It needs to go into a folder structure.....I'm now investigating the information that needs to move to SharePoint and it turns out a quick scan resulted in 210.000 documents with a total volume of 80GB. Off course this is raw data and thus containing archives, zips, access databases and a lost movie and the like (just like any normal network drive :-)). When I look at the limits and best practices: no folder should contain more then 2.000 items (OK) no doc lib should contain more then 2.000.000 items (more then OK) no file should be larger then 2GB (OK - we set it to a max of 150MB) It is all fine but my concern is the shear size of the total load. Let's say they don't migrate 80GB but 30-50GB. My Question: can a single MOSS 2007 document library hold this kind of documents and total size? What does this mean for overall performance, backup, search indexing, crawling etc etc? Thnx for any tips!

The guidance really targets "perceived" performance from the end user. As the number of items in a library increase, the user experience to get to a specific document (outside of using SEARCH of course), becomes more combersome. Having 80 GB in a single doc lib is do-able, but not recommended. Where you will most definately see a performance issue is in your backups. Backups are usually scheduled in multiple threads to improve throughput. With all content living in the same library, it lives in the same database as well. As such, the backup will take longer than if the content was spread over multiple databases. So in conclusion, it's not that your client can NOT do it that way, it's just not recommended. Usually when you have that much data, it can be logically architected and split by some common denominator. When you reach guidance limits, it's time to look at your architecture and taxonomy for sure! I trust that answers your question... Thanks C http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog

Hi C, thnx for your reply. :-) you say: "split by some common denominator" and you are correct. The problem is, there are 2 paths we can take: path 1: all customers in 1 library path 2: 1 library per customer and that is where the problem lies. My customer has an inmense number of customers.... What I'm looking for here is the question if the user experience will be ok? Do you have any idea how long the backup is going to take (i have zero experience in that field of expertise) Thnx!!!