Store Files in SQL Server or keep them on the File Server?

Question

Currently we have thousands of Microsoft Word files, Excel files, PDF\'s, images etc stored in folders/sub folders. These are generated by an application on a regular basis

Answer 1

What kind of documents are we talking about?

Storing documents in your SQL server might be useful because you can relate the documents to other tables and use techniques like Full-text indexing and do things like fuzzy searches.

A downside is that it might be a bit harder to create a backup of the documents. And compression is also possible with NTFS compression or other techniques.