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

I have a fairly deep paper bin that I lay papers flat in. Any marginal paper documents or receipts that aren't obviously garbage and aren't obviously valuable go into this bin, always placed on the top.

Every 10-12 months I pick up the stack and remove, then shred, the bottom 1/4 of it - without review or remorse. If I didn't need them by then I never would.

I find that I actually use this buffer:

Every month or two there actually is some marginal paper document that I need to shuffle through and find. It's in reverse chronological order so that is very simple.

We would be very happy to have you.

For home server usage, I just use it as a frontend to docker-compose files that gives me a pretty UI I can access from a web browser, instead of needing to SSH in to the home server.

1. Beancount via org-mode notes, org-babel for transactions, bean queries from the org mode file for reporting, non perfect, a new thing, in the past I've used GNU Cash but I prefer to put anything in org so...

2-5. equally in org-mode org roam managed notes, non textual stuff as org-attachments linked directly in notes or indirectly "elisp:(start-process-shell-command" alike to run different stuff than mere opening.

I have to retain something for fiscal reasons, something for personal reasons and something are extras. It's not that perfectly crafted, but accessing anything by titles (org-roam-node-find) is like having anything in a graph, accessed via comfy search&narrow. When titles fails consult-rg on the org-mode root (~/notes) does the rest.

I've tries org-ql, to query notes for certain infos like "active contracts I have", but even with templating (yasnippet) it's not that immediate, I have some queries and templates but I do not really use if not very rarely. I've try LLama (Khoj) on my notes but well, results are very bad compared to direct textual mach access. So, yes, I have some clutter, I do not see it much, it does not consume significant amount of storage nor pollute my searches so... It's manageable, rarely I found something is the clutter, so it's not totally useless anyway. I am able to find anything noted so far, of course I do not log my life completely so sometimes I'm looking for things I do not have, that's rare but happen. In this cases the answer is "it depend".

I choose to live digitally in Emacs mostly because of integration: I have mails, todos, notes, anything in the same place/tool/model/paradigm like my mind is one for all.

Downsides: it's a personal thing, not really usable by other family members, not designed for collaborative works, it's possible works together but only as ISOLATED individual, all on their own desktop, possibly Emacs but not necessarily and definitively not "the same Emacs" sharing steps/results by various means like patches via mail, direct textual mails "I found this and that, I conclude that" etc.

Beside that is a nice idea, but too focused on scanned stuff, today many docs are not scanned nor pdfs.