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

Are these documents text based and are you planning on using SQL Server's full text search to search these documents? If not, I don't see any benefit in storing these documents on the database. Ofcourse, you can always store the meta data related to the documents including the path information to the database.