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Ask HN: How do you manage your personal paper documents over the years?

6 points by SchizoDuckie ↗ HN
I'm working on a new Open Source application to handle Document Management for personal use and I'd love to have some insights from the people here.

It's always been my dream to have my paper documents like electricity bills, mortgage papers, bank statements etcetera stored digitally but I've never been able to find something that satisfies my basic needs:

- Not cloud-based

- Encryption

- Should be able to run without knowing how to setup a linux server

- Files put into the system should be still useable without the program files if I ever lose (access to) the program i'm using.

- Fulltext search with OCR

How does HN handle this currently? Do you store it in the cloud? on a private server? on a usb stick? or just plain old boxes and filing cabinets?

6 comments

[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 18.1 ms ] thread
marssaxman
I manage them by throwing them away as quickly as possible.

If I need copies of a bank statement for some reason, I go to the bank and ask them to print one for me.

sandrae
I have an USB stick for every year. The USB stick has a metal surface and I write the name of the year on the stick.
brudgers
Physical files. It sucks but so does managing digital files. The suck is in the filing not the medium.
SchizoDuckie
Would you agree that the suck of filing would be significantly less if you could just snap a photo with your phone, push it to an application, and later just have to handle some details on the filing?
EvanAnderson
I've wanted to scratch this itch for years and keep putting it off. Your desires don't look too far off from mine. (I do want a relational database-based index, and I'm fine having encryption handled by the filesystem.)

For now I've been scanning the documents and storing the paper copies in boxes in the order they were scanned. My eventual hope is to import the scans into the mythical document management system, categorize the documents, then go back thru the boxes destroying any items that I don't absolutely need on paper.

SchizoDuckie
I'm planning to support exactly that workflow.

Drop a bunch of PDFs on the program, queue them up for (later) processing, (auto)-tag, categorize and fulltext index them. I'd be so happy when that's done