Where are my documents stored?

NOTE: This post regards to SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013, but there are some novelties in 2013 version, please refer to this post. Except different table name (AllDocStreams is called DocStreams in SP 2013), everything else is applicable to all SharePoint versions.


Have you ever wondered where does Sharepoint store all your documents you upload to document libraries?

No? Well, I'll tell you anyway.

Sharepoint stores all documents to a single SQL Server database, usually it is called WSS_Content, or, WSS_Content_someGuid if you have many Web Applications in your SP Farm. Yes, they are all stored to database, which is bad news for your machines performace.

Why is that bad?

Well, because documents (pdf, doc, xls, ...) are what we call BLOBs (Binary Large Object) and databases are not very good in handling BLOBs. Large amount of documents in Sharepoint is going to decrease performance of your server.

What can you do about that?

You can send all your BLOBs to a file system using EBS or RBS, but we'll talk about that some other time.

Today, let's just see where are our documents located.

Open SQL Management Studio and connect to Microsoft##SSEE database.

Expand Database in Object explorer on left side of the screen.
Expand WSS_Content database. This is what you get:

Now, you can see two tables where all your document data is stored; dbo.AllDocs and dbo.AllDocStreams.

Let's say that you have document in one of your libraries named "Report.xls". You can find it in dbo.AllDoc table:

In that table you can find all sort of data about your document, but document data is not there, it is in another table. Here you just need to copy Id of document so you can search document data in another table, dbo.AllDocStreams, like this:

And here, in column "Content" is your documents data.
That's it!