You would imagine wrong. I'm running a video sharing page (think FB&youtube mashed together with a dash of blogger) with about 800k unique/month users and it's no picnic.
/briefly worked at last.fm
What I'm saying is that there is more than it meets the eye.
Or the good old' NFS?
How do you handle where to put the files on which disks? do you write custom software or there's some sort of off-the-shelf software to do this?
The reason I asked about this is because it looked like a few people I talked to seem to prefer to use Distributed File System such as HBase, GlusterFS or something else so that they don't have to write extra code.
And I'm guessing you back them all up on daily base as well?
Like I said, nothing fancy but it works without any issues (apart from a small delay when you have to copy the file to 2 or 3 different servers (redundancy) before it becomes available, but it's not a big problem but I have few ideas how to solve that if it becomes one :)).
Wish you all the best to hit and solve that problem (meaning you'll be successful by that time I'm guessing (^_^)).