Any practical limit on PVD database size?

[Roy22]

I'm very impressed with PVD, so impressed in fact that my database file is now 600Mb in size, mostly due to screenshots saved within it. 

It will no doubt keep growing too.  Is there any point (by way of number of movies, or filesize) at which I should start to fear problems of any kind with it?  And yes, I do keep a backup copy. 

[rick.ca]

It depends on the capability of your system. Until this week, I was running a database this size on an eight year old machine. Many operations were very slow, but it worked. As for the size of screenshots and other images, I doubt there's any reason to be concerned. Regardless of their number and size, managing them within the database is less error prone and more efficient than leaving them out in the file system.

As for the number of movies, there's probably reason to be concerned—but not the reason you may think. My database has 1,700 visible movies, ...and 220,000 "invisible" movies. There are this many because it's saving records for the filmographies of the 28,000 people in the database. This is a lot of people, but (theoretically) they're just the ones associated with the visible movies in the database. The number would be much higher if I did not use the option to restrict actors to those included on the IMDb main page (the top 15 credited).

[Roy22]

Thanks for the reply.  I am rather stunned at the size of your database.  Whilst mine has grown to 600Mb with perhaps rather rash inclusion of too many screen shots, it has just a basic 300 or so movies so far, with nothing 'clever' going on in the way you describe.

But I suppose to paraphrase your answer, slowness is the worst problem I can expect to face, rather than something worrying like corruption?  As an aside, is there any practical difference between backups created via PVD's menu (think they have .old. in the name?), and traditional backups of the database held elsewhere?

[rick.ca]

I prefer to back up my database according to my usual backup routine. This automatically makes two daily copies (local + external) and keeps multiple versions. Even if I want to make an immediate backup, I'll do so by making a copy using my file manager. It's faster, more reliable because it's not compressing the data, and can be done while the database is still loaded in PVD.

[nostra]

The size is limited by your file system as follows:
FAT12 has a 32MB file size limit
FAT16 has a 2GB file size limit (Windows NT 3 or newer)
FAT32 has a 2GB file size limit
FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit (Windows NT5 / 2000 and newer)
NTFS has a 4GB file size limit (Windows NT)
NTFS has a 16EiB file size limit (Windows NT5 / 2000 and newer)

[rick.ca]

NTFS has a 16EiB file size limit

Although I understand this is for non-disk storage (holographic media?), so the practical limit is a meager 256 Tb. If I want to import the entire IMDb, I probably only have 255 Tb remaining for other things.

[nostra]

 

[mgpw4me@yahoo.com]

Manufacturer     Seagate
Model             Barracuda LP 2TB
Price (Street)      $179.99
Idle power      5.5W
Operating power     6.8W   

Let's see that's about $90 per TB * 255 hard drives = $22,950.  If the Canadian dollar ever laps the American, I might have to consider it 

[dfranks]

Rick. I checked it out and 16 EiB is 16 x 1024 x 1024 Terabytes which is about 16 million Terabytes so you should have enough room left for all your favorite Holoport adventures.