MySQL - Alternatives to "text" columns to store HTML Content

I have a large PHP application and a MySQL Database for my company. All communications such as emails, quotes which are HTML based, are surrently stored in "text" columns in MySql tables. These tables have grown to be quite large now, 15-16GB in size, and are slow to restore, move to other servers etc.

Is there a more modern approach to storing information of this nature, perhaps a different kind of database altogether which is perfect for storing documents. Obviously this data would need to be retrievable from the core application etc.

I've heard of things such as MongoDB but don't know if these are designed to cater for this kind of storage.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to move away from "Text" columns? I'm sure this must be an old fashioned technique by now.

Regards

James