Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

- if you need more than one box. will you still have a single box 10 years from now or will it be 2? good luck trying to retrieve something in 20 years when you have even more boxes

- it only takes 1 fire or flood to destroy all of your documents. once they are digital you can easily make copies and store them in a few different locations

tbh making digital copies isnt that complicated compared to throwing something in a box. i just scan everything into a year/month folder and do as you do... worry about finding them later. spending time tagging or naming stuff after theyve been digitised is optional.

Most of my paper is now scanned - I think I have two boxes left in my garden shed. I don't bother with OCR because search doesn't help me when I don't know what to search for (e.g. invoice for a jumper I bought in 2010 - fashion labels rarely call their jumpers jumper).

And so I rely on meta data. There's not much out there in terms of open-source tagging software, and even less in terms of an open tagging approach. I ended up with tagspaces, which is a web app packaged up as a native app. The approach to tagging is good (tags appended to file name), but the app is abysmally poor. Slow - waiting up to 30 seconds for a pop-up menu to appear. It assumes tag-based searches work in only one way.

The intent is to write some native apps to solve my biggest problems. For now I'm still trying to clear the backlog of un-scanned paper docs (not going to get this done for me, because privacy). I tag important stuff, like employment contracts, mortgage agreements, passports and birth certificates...

Hope to have everything done by the time I cash in my chips. Might make for a useful dataset for someone somewhere some day.

I've been doing this for years already (albeit using Google Drive - yes, some people dont trust Google - I understand that, but doesn't bother me) and these are some of the common use-cases where I find it really useful:

* Tax returns. This alone makes it worthwhile.

* Call-centers. You'll often have the reference/account number/etc you need quicker than the operator at the other end can look them up.

* Travelling. Pulling up travel insurance etc details from your phone when you're stranded in an airport is so useful.

* The inevitable "we need to see a copy if your birth certificate/driving license/passport/last 3 months of bank statements/bill from a utility to validate your identity" requests. Either email the PDF directly or print out and go - no box rumaging.

* Health Records. Looking up the name of those pills you were prescribed 18 months ago, or when you had vaccinations etc.

* Those moments when you're convinced you've already had your car serviced/paid that bill/renewed the warranty on your washing machine/dealt with something but cant quite remember. Tap-tap yeah there is the confirmation from the appliance manufacturer saying I am still covered by warranty - emailed it to the support people. Ball is now in their court. Job done - whats next on my to-do list?

It comes up surprisingly often. Sure, not every single day, but certainly enough to justify the very very very small time investment of scanning it and uploading the PDFs Google Drive (I am sure there are alternatives that work just as well). When you retrieve something, the time-savings totally make it worthwhile.

As someone else has said elsewhere, often when you need these documents it is a stressful situation - a death, an illness, an accident, something "wrong" going on financially etc. You dont want to waste time frantically digging through dusty boxes of paperwork trying to find something when you can just tap a few keys and get it in seconds with zero hassle.

I highly recommend it.

I "bootstrapped" my archive by heading into the office at the weekend and using the huge printers to scan in boxes full of old paper documents to PDFs. Now I top-up with a home scanner attached to my LAN - if you're looking to buy a scanner for home, make sure you get one with an automatic document feeder that can do both sides at once so you can just chuck the papers in and hit go, then collect the PDFs from your network drive.