Shallow Copy with RBS in SharePoint 2010 SP1

As we all know SharePoint 2010 allows the use of RBS (Remote Blob Storage). RBS allows to store unstructured data (Documents, PPT etc) in File System while the structured data (metadata, list data) is stored in SQL Content DB thus allowing to effectively manage the large system. Generally the unstructured data is a major portion of total data in any SharePoint deployments (up to 80%) so RBS becomes a very effective tool when we need to manage a large SharePoint deployments.

But with RBS we can face a problems when we need to migrate Site Collection from one Content DB to another. A new feature with SharePoint 2010 SP1 allows to move the Structured Data (stored in SQL DB) from one Content DB to another Content DB without really migrating the Unstructured Data. This requires that both the Source and Destination Content DB uses the same Blob Storage:

The below figures explains the Shallow Copy with SharePoint 2010:

The advantage of Shallow copying is that it is much faster. It is quite seamless and you can move the site collections between Content DB's without much hassles.

There is another one kind of migration with RBS which is there. That is called Deep Copy. In that the Unstructured Data also moves between the BLOB stores:

 Hope you find it useful :)