Would it corrupt the DB if attachment dirs are deleted?

In the recent discussions about the time it takes to do a backup, there was a mention about the size of attachments, etc.

Would it cause a corruption or loss of referential integrity if we were to delete the older attachments from the directories? We get lots of screen captures, sent in .bmp format, and each takes > 1MB.

Can we delete C:\AdventNet\ME\ServiceDesk\fileAttachments\Request\[MMMYYYY]\[Request_Number]

and have the database still work fine?

It all depends on whether there is an interactive scan for the existence of a Request_Number directory as a request is looked up, or if there's an internal pointer that directly points to it.

Let me know if there is a more preferable way to delete attachments of older requests, or if I'm restricted to deleting the older requests altogether, which may affect yearly technician stats or lose justification for headcount if we're finding a huge number of tickets and a high number of SLA failures.

Justin