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Ask HN: What do you use to digitize your paper records?

13 points by narak ↗ HN
I'm looking at digitizing most of my personal paper records like tax files, large value receipts, important letters, legal documents etc. The plan is to scan them to PDF or TIFF using a feed scanner. I want a solution that encrypts and backs up to the cloud. Anyone doing this? Suggestions for a good system and tools for this requested. Thanks!

Edit: So far I've found Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) which seems like a good open source secure vault on top of my existing Dropbox/Google Drive storage.

5 comments

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afarrell
I had to do this when my wife and I moved from Austin, TX to London. My wife and I turned 2 filing cabinets worth of files into a dropbox directory tree. For the actual scanning, I followed the wirecutter's advice and found that the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i Mobile Document Scanner worked well. It seems they are now recommending[1] a different scanner though.

For the actual organization, we had a naming scheme of "$(source of document) $(title) $(date %F).pdf". For example: "Texas DMV Toyota Sienna Registration Receipt 2015-05-16.pdf

[1] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-portable-document-scan...

narak
Thanks. Did you bother with OCR and encryption?
tedmiston
I'm currently using a camera scanner app for iOS called TurboScan. I move scanned documents onto my MacBook and back them up with the rest of my files. In the past, I've kept security conscious information inside encrypted disk images with a local and remote backup just like everything else.
bbcbasic
I don't. I generally keep them or shred them.
ishbits
I also use a ScanSnap. An S300 I got back in 2009. Completely worth it if you scan then shred all your documents.

Ever few months I'd pull out some old files and put a podcast or something and scan a few hundred sheets.