Remember that with many of those tools, you'll need to update the database afterwards anyhow, and that's not necessarily a trivial thing to do after arbitrary changes to the directory. Really though, you do have a point that, depending on needs, it's not entirely unreasonable to prefer the filesystem to be the primary data store. I personally strongly prefer the integrity constraints possible when the database manages everything, but I can see how people might have different needs. With changes to the files mentioned, I wouldn't use mv (psql can rename the blobs), and for the rest, I'd pull them out of the database, change them, and insert (update?) them back in. *shrug*