of the
It does not happen often but it does happen. After some retrospection, I urge everyone to be very careful when following Joel’s advice on using attachment extractor solution. (Some say one needs to be careful when following any Joel’s advice but that’d be a discussion for another day).
My arguments (both of them):
- It is not supported.
- It does not come with the source code meaning you cannot support it yourself either.
Unless either of these change, i.e. Microsoft Labs folks have a change of heart and release it as an open source, or offer some kind of support, you’re risking of being seriously stuck if something goes wrong. (The only reasonable option is to call Joel, his direct number is 555-365-HELL). The solution does not move existing files and we cannot enhance it without going through some shady activities of reverse engineering the code.
What are the options?
- Third-party solutions. Paid and supported.
- Open source. One of the upsides is availability for on-premises. Not that on-premises storage is expensive or scarce but it’d be an interesting option to minimise the SQL consumption prior to the migration to online.
We all know George never recommends unsupported solutions https://crmtipoftheday.com/102/replace-the-first-things-first-woman/
Hi there,
Author of that open source project you mentioned. Just want to point out that the main issue with on-premise and storage is backups and the time it takes to move those backups.
We started with 100Gb odd worth of attachments (yep) and the daily backups and moving these off-site was the main issue we had. I know there’s all kinds of incremental backup schemes, but as a smaller company, the ops guys were doing it this way. So, moved all the attachments out and now the much more managable 2Gb sizes makes them all smile 🙂