Ask HN: How do you organize/store your personal information and documents?
Doing some research from an Executive Assistant's perspective on how other people keep their information organized.
Link or comment > https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZPS5XXX
Link or comment > https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZPS5XXX
I keep a digital file system the same as my parents used to keep their filing cabinet. Alphabetized folders. Each person in the family (me, wife & kids) has their own folder with all their stuff in it. I have every important document scanned and saved as PDFs. The physical originals live in a real file folder of the same name and organized structure inside the filing cabinet in the closet.
Product receipts for warranties and docs, insurance declarations, taxes, credit card agreements and scanned card copies, etc all organized as you’d typically see in a real filing cabinet with their digital PDF counterparts inside a digital folder.
This is all stored using iCloud Drive (we’re an Apple family) that’s accessible from all my devices. It’s actually been a life saver several times while on travel. Wife lost her passport once coming back from Mexico, being able to pull up a PDF scan kept us from being trapped outside the country.
Some things we really don’t need a SAAS product for. Just create folders and take care to keep them up to date and organized as you would an old school filing cabinet.
I've been scanning all documents for 6 years now, and over that time, I have 4 buckets:
A. scan and file
B. scan and throw
C. scan and shred
D. just throw
Scanner OCRs the docs and drops them into Dropbox (unlimited business plan).
I found that A is a very very tiny minority (1-5%) of all documents.
1. I like OCR, but I don’t like relying on it for search in a vast pool of important documents. Filing in labeled folders means I’m not relying on some obscure algorithm or the accuracy of an OCR tech to make my digital files practical/accessible. This proved the correct way to think when I moved files from Dropbox, to GDrive and then ultimately iCloud. One service would find what I wanted, the next would not or find some file based on an unexpected match. All that meant I had to spend a significant time digging around. With folders, I have manual organization as a base and can still use search and OCR as a convenience.
2. I find value in the physical files only as a basic backup to a digital outage. Computer fails, phone is left somewhere, internet goes out, etc. it’s not all happened at once yet, but there has been several occasions where just going into the closet and grabbing the hard file was easiest.