File-based systems were the original data storage systems before the invention of database management systems (DBMS). Back in the 1970s, organizations manually stored data across servers in numerous files, such as flat files. These files have a fixed, rigid format and multiple copies of data stored for each department, resulting in data redundancy. These led to various challenges, especially data consistency, sharing, security, and retrieval. Analyzing these files was also challenging if we needed to join multiple files for one end-to-end record. As a result, file-based systems could not keep up with the changing data and innovations.
With the invention of DBMS, data transactions comply with ACID properties (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability), which allows for data consistency, integrity, recovery, and concurrency. In addition, today’s advanced DBMS system provides disaster recovery, backup and restore, data searching, and data encryption and security. Even though the DBMS has evolved, due to the advancement of big data, cloud technologies, the Internet, social media, and advancing data formats, file storage is again a hot topic.