How archiving lots of files? (tera bytes)

Hello,

I'm looking for the best way to archive documents (of any type). The documents must be stocked on a server. The client pcs must be able to consult those archived documents. (By using for exemple a webservice)


I already found 2 solutions :

- Save the files into database blobs...
Problems :
       * I've to archive tera bytes of files --> database will probably slow down.
       * We only have one large database file --> not easy for backuping and transfering to another server or several servers.


- Save lots of files each after the other into a large file till we reached a certain size. Once reached the maximum size we can create another large-file. By stocking the offset and the length of each files we will be able to consult the right files.




If someone has a better solution, please let me know.

Any ideas are welcome!!!



Thanks