How to encode a binary and text file into a string

I'm using the java commons base64 api.  Here is what i need to do.  My program creates a pdf and html file.  I need to base64 encode each file into a string and then store it into a text field in a database.  and at a later date retrieve it and decode it and store it back into the file type it should be.   But i'm not quite to sure.  Here is what i have so far:

                   File file = new File( "D:/projects/base64code/test.pdf" );
                   File fileOut = new File( "D:/projects/base64code/test_out.pdf" );

                   byte[] scratch = new byte[8*1024];

                   FileInputStream in = new FileInputStream(file);
                   FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(fileOut);

//                    These next two give you super turbo performance speed
                   BufferedInputStream bin = new BufferedInputStream(in);
                   BufferedOutputStream bout = new BufferedOutputStream(out);

//                    If you don't loop, then you're probably losing data
                   int consumed = 0;
                   do {
                        consumed = bin.read( scratch );
                        if ( consumed > 0 )
                        {
                            bout.write( scratch, 0, consumed );
                        }
                   } while ( consumed >= 0 );
                  
                   byte[] encodedArray = Base64.encodeBase64( scratch );
                  
                  
                   byte[] decodeArray = new byte[8*1024];
                   decodeArray = Base64.decodeBase64(encodedArray);


So what i'm trying to do in this example is:
1.  Encode the pdf file.
2.  Retrieve the string value so i can store it into a column in a database table ( I'm not sure how to do that here)
3.  Take the string value (just to test that i can convert back to a byte and decode) and convert into a byte then save to the appropriate file name.

Thanks in advance.