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

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

#41

Post by rovr138 »

grvdrm wrote: post #25
viraptor wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You get access to a shell via ssh, https://www.rsync.net/products/platform.html

Looking at, https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Arsync.net%2Fproducts&t=ipho...

You have rclone, sftp, rsync, restic, borg, synology and other.

My understanding is there’s no bandwidth pricing.

(I’m sure they’ll show up and clarify it. Amazing they always seem to do so)

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

#42

Post by moooo99 »

zirror wrote: post #37
moooo99 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Same. I was unaware that Belgium or India have such systems and often wished for them to exist in Germany, but thought that it was impossible for privacy reasons in the EU. Now it's clear that it's just incompetence or lack of funds or vision in Germany.

„Datenschutz“ (data protection) is an extremely popular excuse for any failing digital project, in reality, it’s probably a mix between complete incompetence (see digital drivers license), a lack of funds (look at smaller cities/towns) and and lack of capable employees with It backgrounds.

Looking at the situation here it’s really damming that Germany not only has essentially no digital processes implemented, the people in charge seem to are even lacking something as fundamental as a coherent vision how it should work at some point. That the current coalition also decided to essentially cut funds for digitalization projects isn’t making the issue any better

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

#43

Post by rovr138 »

crabbone wrote: post #32

Having built complicated storage systems during work hours I had a strong urge to build a home NAS. What stops me is that I have this Documents directory on my laptop, which was salvaged from another disk that failed about three years ago, and served for 11 years prior to that, and some documents were copied to it from a PC I owned before then... and going farther back doesn't really make sense as none of the documen…

Any backup? Curious how you do it

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

#44

Post by neilv »

brap wrote: post #18

I have a messy drawer where I dump all of this stuff. It’s basically write-only, once I throw something in there I know I’ll never look for it again. For digital stuff it’s mostly the same idea. If it’s email (which is almost always the case), I archive and forget about it. If it’s something else, I’ll throw it in my virtual “messy drawer” which is just a folder in Google Drive. You are getting quite a few clever ide…

I used to do a box like this. The "temporal ordering" helped narrow search. But I found that finding things in it was still so difficult, that it wasn't worthwhile every time it'd be useful. There was also trying to find one document, and having to do a second thorough pass when I didn't find it in the first pass, which could take over an hour of misery.

Today, I routinely download and save PDF/OFX/QFX for every financial and insurance statement, as they become available. The few important paper documents I receive, go into a "to-scan" pile, which I try to clear out every few months.

(I really need to set up a scanning appliance/station that takes only seconds to use. I only need a to-scan pile because it currently takes about 15 minutes to set up for scanning and put things away after.)

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

#45

Post by morisy »

A few folks have talked about digitizing paper documents, so one of my favorite tricks for iPhone havers:

iPhones have very nice scanning tools built in, but it’s buried in the Notes app. Create a new note, click the camera icon, then “scan documents” and it will create a very nice, usually well cropped and OCRd scan that’s saved as a PDF you can then export elsewhere. Wish it was a standalone app because it works so well, and this is from someone who helps digitize and preserve paper documents for a living.

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

#46

Post by paulhalla »

brap wrote: post #18

I have a messy drawer where I dump all of this stuff. It’s basically write-only, once I throw something in there I know I’ll never look for it again. For digital stuff it’s mostly the same idea. If it’s email (which is almost always the case), I archive and forget about it. If it’s something else, I’ll throw it in my virtual “messy drawer” which is just a folder in Google Drive. You are getting quite a few clever ide…

I use the same system! Never thought of it in those terms though. TIL it's essentially an analog write-only data lake.

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

#47

Post by g8oz »

brap wrote: post #18

I have a messy drawer where I dump all of this stuff. It’s basically write-only, once I throw something in there I know I’ll never look for it again. For digital stuff it’s mostly the same idea. If it’s email (which is almost always the case), I archive and forget about it. If it’s something else, I’ll throw it in my virtual “messy drawer” which is just a folder in Google Drive. You are getting quite a few clever ide…

A good book on dealing with the messy drawer and its contents is "Organise Your Paperwork: From Paper Mess To Paperless". Highly recommended.

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

#48

Post by alkhatib »

morisy wrote: post #45

A few folks have talked about digitizing paper documents, so one of my favorite tricks for iPhone havers: iPhones have very nice scanning tools built in, but it’s buried in the Notes app. Create a new note, click the camera icon, then “scan documents” and it will create a very nice, usually well cropped and OCRd scan that’s saved as a PDF you can then export elsewhere. Wish it was a standalone app because it works so…

Long press the notes app icon, and you’ll get a shortcut to scan documents

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

#49

Post by salil999 »

Apple solves this problem well! Note that I use iCloud family which allows me to share the storage with my family. But for going down the list:

A) Mint for most financials. iCloud for storage of documents.

B) Apple Health for keeping track of my records. For ad-hoc stuff I use iCloud to store the documents.

C) Product and service info I use iCloud for. Logins and credentials to them are stored in my family's 1Password vault.

D) All legal documents stored on iCloud.

E) For photos and videos I use iCloud Shared Albums. It's unlimited free online storage of photos. Otherwise it's a mix of iCloud storage and the Notes app on Apple devices.

Obviously you can tell I'm deep in the iCloud ecosystem but personally I feel it's worth it. The synchronization and ease of use for my family is well worth it. For what it's worth I'm on the 200GB plan.

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

#50

Post by bitmover »

paltman wrote: post #36

I use https://www.trustworthy.com/ and Dropbox and am very happy with this combination.

+1 for Trustworthy, it’s a really fantastic product. The app is well designed, constantly improving and the founders really seem to understand the problem they are solving.
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