Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 141 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?

#21

Post by moooo99 »

AlexanderDhoore wrote: post #12

In Belgium, every citizen has access to a "digital vault" provided by the government, which is accessible using their ID card. Individuals can upload up to 1GB of documents into this vault. It's a well-designed system that ensures privacy during one's lifetime, but you can choose what happens with it after your passing. https://www.izimi.be/en/

In Germany we have government entities that are unable/refusing to accept anything but Mail in forms or fax as an official communication channel :/

I’m jealous over countries that have such well designed systems in place to make things easy for their citizens

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?

#22

Post by wil421 »

TrueNAS Scale (formerly FreeNAS) server with 6 x 4TB ZFS storage in a Raidz2 (or was it z3?) configuration.

I rsync my picture and document library from my MBP to the NAS. The MBP also has a Backblaze backup. 2-4 times a year I sync my pics, docs, and backups to a 6TB drive that’s offline.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?

#24

Post by vr46 »

A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

This works better than I can possibly tell you.

I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?

#25

Post by grvdrm »

viraptor wrote: post #11
letier wrote: post #6

All types of documents go into a paperless ngx. All documents are tagged properly so that I can find them again. Also the search worked quite well so far. I’m still archiving the previous years currently, as I set up everything this year. Backups via restic end up on backblaze. Haven’t gotten around to set up the local backup. This is a good reminder to do so. :) The photos end up in iCloud and Adobe with a backup in…

Same here, paperless changed my life. At my previous place I was also using one of the services where you get assigned an address with a fake unit number and they receive/scan/email all your post. The current country has much less paper mail, so I stopped, but would recommend that approach in general. I'm also mirroring the family Google photos locally and backing it all up to rsync.net. Regarding retention - everyth…

Interesting solution. Looking at the pricing for rsync: do they charge you for data transferred or data at rest? Or maybe I’m misunderstanding their pricing altogether. Also what are you using to actually sync?

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?

#27

Post by vertnerd »

I've been doing the data storage tango for thirty years now, and the one constant is that everything requires maintenance or has to be moved to a different platform and software eventually. Today, everything is in Google Drive and Google Photos; about 600 GB worth of data and media. Maintenance consists of an annual Takeout ordeal with copies going on two different removable drives, one of which is stored in a so-called fireproof bag.

The fireproof bag also has my account/password list (printed out once a year), birth certificates, titles, and passports.

If you are the tech person in your family, think about what happens if you die. Will your family be able to figure out and maintain your system? Mine is far from perfect, but most of my family can figure out Google Drive.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?

#28

Post by egeozcan »

moooo99 wrote: post #21
AlexanderDhoore wrote: post #12

In Belgium, every citizen has access to a "digital vault" provided by the government, which is accessible using their ID card. Individuals can upload up to 1GB of documents into this vault. It's a well-designed system that ensures privacy during one's lifetime, but you can choose what happens with it after your passing. https://www.izimi.be/en/

In Germany we have government entities that are unable/refusing to accept anything but Mail in forms or fax as an official communication channel :/ I’m jealous over countries that have such well designed systems in place to make things easy for their citizens

In Germany, the government entities also rarely, if ever, communicate with each other. I'm offered a citizenship and while I'm extremely grateful and even considering the fact that Germany is the country I love the most by a huge margin, I couldn't bring myself to start gathering the documents they need from various government offices. It's been many years, I wonder if I'll get on with it sometime in the future.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?

#29

Post by newaccount74 »

We scan every document and put it in a folder synced with SyncThing. We throw the original away unless it is something official like a birth certificate.

We use SyncThing because it is free, doesn't require user accounts, and works across Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS (Möbius) and Android.

We have a bunch of high level folders (eg. Health, School, etc). Inside that folder every document is named starting with a date, eg: "2023-09-11 Invoice Dentist Kid1.pdf".

So far I've always found every document.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?

#30

Post by altisome »

AlexanderDhoore wrote: post #12

In Belgium, every citizen has access to a "digital vault" provided by the government, which is accessible using their ID card. Individuals can upload up to 1GB of documents into this vault. It's a well-designed system that ensures privacy during one's lifetime, but you can choose what happens with it after your passing. https://www.izimi.be/en/

Similar service is available in India : see digilocker https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiLocker
Post reply on HN