Github uses harddrives, and I believe SQL servers do as well, and you will (should) worry about them by proxy instead of directly. If you believe someone else (

Github uses harddrives, and I believe SQL servers do as well, and you will (should) worry about them by proxy instead of directly. If you believe someone else (github, or whatevercloud) is going to care more about your data on their drives, than you about your data on your drives, well, best of luck :) Still, it might make sense to use a database to store your documents, depending on your situations, like, is a receipt a text document or an image? What are the access patterns you expect? Is it write and forget, or will you access it once a year, or once each hour? how searchable do you need it? What is large amounts? Terabytes? Petabytes? A nice directory structure could still get you very far, depending on your needs, maybe even one with accompanying database for use as a searchable index to find the document (file) you need.