I just scan everything into a folder on iCloud Drive with SwiftScan (which also does OCR) and use macOS and iOS Spotlight to find stuff.
Seems to work pretty well. I have to refer to receipts in it all the time.
Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?
31–40 of 48 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?
#32Paperless-ng (https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng) is the way to go. I have an instance of it running on a RPI 4 and a network attached scanner. New documents that I need stored are either immediately scanned using the app on my phone (And its free software, get it from FDroid) or via the actual scanner which obviously gives better quality.
Paperless then OCRs the documents and stores the original and a PDF/A version for long term archival. It learns from my tagging and classification and auto classifies them in the future.
The web interface is also pretty slick and allows you to do full text search on all your documents really fast.
Tagging and categories is also a more superior form of organisation than simple folders.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?
#33Paperless-ng ( https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng ) is the way to go. I have an instance of it running on a RPI 4 and a network attached scanner. New documents that I need stored are either immediately scanned using the app on my phone (And its free software, get it from FDroid) or via the actual scanner which obviously gives better quality. Paperless then OCRs the documents and stores the original and a PD…
Can only recommend this way.
I'm running paperless-ng on my Synology NAS and I love it. I've additionally bought myself a Brother DS-640 scanner to get good scans also on the go and it works like a charm for the last few months.
Also because it's running on my NAS, it's automatically reachable via Tailscale from all my devices and gets encrypted + uploaded to Backblaze B2 once a week via HyperBackup. Setting all of this up took less than one hour.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is laminating faster than making a copy? I woulda thought the opposite
I think the joke was the fact that lamination involves significant heat, which would immediately destroy the thermal receipts. Thus speeding up their destruction, not their copying.
Yes, putting thermal paper through a thermal laminator will turn it all black. Don't try it at home!
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?
#35We've tried keeping our hundreds of docs organised to no avail but what has worked for us for some time now is to describe that document as well as possible in the title :
Eg: Ju brazilian Birth cert translation + original 2019.pdf
Then we just have Everything running in the back ground and search for whatever we need using that as it indexes all your files in real time and is very lightweight.
Everything is lighting quick when it comes to filtering a list of file names so we usually find what we need in a couple of seconds... Super easy to pull up too as they offer a global short cut key. Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E in our case...
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?
#36Paperless-ng ( https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng ) is the way to go. I have an instance of it running on a RPI 4 and a network attached scanner. New documents that I need stored are either immediately scanned using the app on my phone (And its free software, get it from FDroid) or via the actual scanner which obviously gives better quality. Paperless then OCRs the documents and stores the original and a PD…
Can only recommend this way. I'm running paperless-ng on my Synology NAS and I love it. I've additionally bought myself a Brother DS-640 scanner to get good scans also on the go and it works like a charm for the last few months. Also because it's running on my NAS, it's automatically reachable via Tailscale from all my devices and gets encrypted + uploaded to Backblaze B2 once a week via HyperBackup. Setting all of t…
How does Tailscale get you the syno files on your phone?
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?
#37Scan everything to searchable pdf, store it in a simple folder structure.. and use Mac or iOS spotlight to search for things. To make it a little less work for some things I have Hazel (Mac file automation app) watch my downloads folder for pdfs. If the contents match a set of unique things, like my electricity account, provider name, number and so on.. then the file gets renamed and moved to the correct folder.
I download the pdf version after paying the bill, so there’s never any confusion.
I used to have Hazel rename and move to desktop and I’d file manually once paid.
As for folder structures and file names, I use 2022/Hydro/2022-01-26 Hydro bill.pdf
Everything lives in sync.com (similar to Dropbox etc, but better security) and accessible on all my devices.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?
#38No nah nope. You don’t need an app for this. You need the classic hierarchical file system and good folder and file names. I put it all in a VeraCrypt volume so it’s secure if the device is lost or stolen.
> You need the classic hierarchical file system and good folder and file names Such as?
Options:
1. Make your own according to your own needs (what I do). 2. Copy one of the other comments here. 3. Something yet more structured like https://johnnydecimal.com/
Don't forget about symlinks. They can be helpful
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?
#39I don’t know if there’s an Android version, but I use “Scanner Pro” by Readdle on my iPhone to scan physical documents, then use airdrop to move them to my Mac where I later file them under ~/Docs/ORGNAME/YYYY-MM-DD with some description of what it is by at the end of the file name.
Looking at the settings just now, there’s an auto-upload option in there I haven’t taken advantage of yet, that allows for popular sync services as well as WebDAV. Which means I could configure this to auto upload docs to my NAS. I need to get on that…
Anyway, that app is pretty great in my experience. I think it even does OCR when converting to PDF automatically.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can only recommend this way. I'm running paperless-ng on my Synology NAS and I love it. I've additionally bought myself a Brother DS-640 scanner to get good scans also on the go and it works like a charm for the last few months. Also because it's running on my NAS, it's automatically reachable via Tailscale from all my devices and gets encrypted + uploaded to Backblaze B2 once a week via HyperBackup. Setting all of t…
How does Tailscale get you the syno files on your phone?
I'm not OP but I'm using the same. Setting up file and network sharing using Tailscales DNS service is trivial.