Ask HN: How do you manage your personal documents? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you manage your personal documents?

261 pointsftio179 comments

As I get older, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to manage the seemingly constant influx of 'important' documents.

Fortunately, most documents are sent to me digitally, where I can easily file them on my computer and back them up.

For non-digital documents like auto lease paperwork, home-related legal documents, major bills that I want to keep around, etc, my filing system is incredibly poor. By 'poor', I mean: it takes far too long to find the document I'm looking for, it's difficult to decide where to file something, and it's too difficult to find things.

Every few years, we take a stab at reorganizing our files, but the lack of searchability and the other affordances of digital documents leaves me wanting more.

How do you organize your personal documents? Do you digitze them somehow? Do you have a great filing system? I want to know.

View on HN

I put all paper documents I receive on top of a stack. Therefore it's roughly sorted by date.

If I need to get an invoice from last december, I just lookup around this date in my stack.

Time spent to store information : 0 ; time spent to find something : a few minutes, once every other month.

Every five years, I take the bottom of the stack and file it in the cellar. And I come back from the cellar with 10 year old documents I can either trash (in my office secured bin) or keep in my filing box.

I also keep contracts (insurance, bank, ...) in this filing box.

Last thing : All documents that will be used for my tax returns (at least the equivalent of it in France) go in one folder. I will use it once a year then file this in the "taxes" box.

This would be my ideal way of doing it! Too bad my memory isn’t good enough to remember dates even in the scale of years and I probably wouldn’t be able to locate contracts/warranty papers etc with ease. I’m curious to try it still however just to see.

For me, the few things that are more important (insurance paperwork, certain types of health records, legal stuff, etc.) I do file separately in a file cabinet (or my fireproof box). But tossing most of it in a pile works pretty well--and anything it turns out I do need (e.g. for filing taxes) is almost certainly near the top of the pile.

So when you need something and find it, do you just restack it on top of the pile, or do you spend time to locate the correct time slot in the pile and slide them in there?

> top of the pile

MRU cache, if you will

Now it's not sorted so you're going to end up having to do a linear scan of the entire pile if you do this regularly.

I leave a mark (folding the next sheet for instance) to be able to put the paper at the same place when I'm finished using it.

I do exactly this, except I take a time-stamped photo of it and throw the hard copy away. Google docs automatically turns it into a PDF.

It increases the Big O on capturing it, but reduces space and access complexity.

For long running docs like titles, and certifications, passports, and whatnot I stick in an important papers storage Tupperware so it's safe from water damage

Nitpicking (of course, HN, what did you expect): capturing is still O(1).

HA. True I guess it just adds a constant to capture time . Good catch.

I would argue that it’s O(n), increasing linearly with number of pages of the document ;-).

I see where you're coming from and we're probably getting wayyy in the weeds on this...:)....but I think they mean an insert of item into already existing array is O(1) and from your perspective ..traversal over time would be O(n) so I think y'all might both correct from diff perspectives.

I was thinking increasing insert time would increase Big O but they made the point that it's a constant which will cancel out as n approaches infinity.

God I'm a nerd.

I do exactly the same. My stack is around 3cm every year, very manageable. Important documents i probably need to look at again, I also scan with my phone and store them in my backuped documents folder on my pc.

I do this too. If there's one Life Rule I've learned as I got older, it's that YAGNI extends well beyond software development.

The "important papers pile" is a great example of that. Not a second spent wondering where to put something, or even whether it's worth keeping at all.

I do this, too. It started because I was lazy but it turned out to be an almost optimal solution when comparing effort and use. I needed some specific document from a certain date from a huge stack of 3 years of documents. Some eyeballed manual binary searching and I was at my desired document within 5 or 6 lookups.

I used to do this, and then I got married. My wife can't spend a month without rearranging the whole damn house though so it didn't scale to marriage. Now I just have a box I throw everything into that might be important. My few critically important things like birth certificate, passport, residency card, etc. live separately in a fireproof safe.

I just want to comment that your wife sounds like comedy awesomenesss.. So be kind and (in whatever way is your style) show her some appreciation....

EDIT: Its date-night bitch - figure it out

Ha I have the same problem. My wife is constantly cleaning and my organization strategy used to rely on remembering the last place I put something. Our home looks amazing but I can never find anything.

This is pretty much my system as well. It's funny, I thought I was the only one "cheating" in this way, but the comments here indicate that I am in good company.

For over a decade my no-brainer digital file system at both home and work is similar.

Auto-file everything as a time-stack:

- new files go on the desktop

- if I didn't name file right rules automatically rename it per ISO 8601 to "YYYY-MM-DD - title.ext"

- after the file isn't opened for >2 days, it gets auto-sorted into (more or less) "archive/yyyy-mm/yyyy-mm-dd - title.ext"

- note: stick to ISO 8601 across tooling: https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html

With this system, the effect is:

- my desktop has today's and yesterday's working files, everything else is auto-cleaned (you may want 5 or 7 days depending on nature of file work)

- when i need something, I "lookup around that date in my stack" because I find it easier to find things by time than by trying to re-imagine what I'd named it.

- when working somewhere where i create more content then I consume, I group by weeks not months: "archive/yyyy-ww/file" (given ~520 folders per decade, you may, or may not, want "archive/yyyy/yyyy-ww/file" depending on your file system's speed at iterating dirs)

- turn week numbers on your calendar, and you can directly open any folder for any week you did stuff.

- no brain power needed!

More about usage:

Method works beautifully even if you prefer topical folders like project-name or finances or whatever, and computer search is fast/easy at still showing you everything made in a given month no matter what folder it's in.

Seeing files by when made visually 'bundles' files made around the same time (e.g. several days' or weeks' work on the same project). Update dates for new versions and a find by name for the rest of the file name will show you all the versions you have, sorted.

This is infinitely superior to the standard workplace practice of "Title Whatever v3 (tim edits B) jfk (copy).doc".

Thanks to the date prefixed name, if I email files, backup/restore them, or otherwise round trip them to some other file system (looking at you, most NAS, SANs, and object stores), I don't lose the metadata of when created, meaning I can still sort round tripped files by name reversed and see files by recency or clustered by when made.

If I can't find by looking around the date, I can always fiddle with search to find things.

I now get unhappy any time a file doesn't start with a date.

Pro-tips: Apple Shortcuts supports ISO 8601 by name for dates and time. On MacOS I use Hazel to maintain this w/o touching it: https://www.noodlesoft.com ... On Windows I use powershell, Linux perl.

I've really been getting into organization just by chronology lately. I don't separate notes by topic anymore, I just write all notes chronologically with dates to break up days. This way I can always flip back through the pages around the time I was working on something to find what notes I took.

I wonder if there are any digital document organizers like this. Something you just drag and drop important digital documents you want to keep track of and it automatically adds date and time information so you can browse through them in the order they've been added.

Wouldn't the filesystem suffice for this? It already tracks creation and modification times, so all you'd need to do is sort chronologically in your UI of choice.

If you wanted something Web-based, you could use Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. and get similar functionality.

The date of the document and when it is add could be different. Also no note about the document in default file system.

It could, but like another user pointed out the last file modification time isn't necessarily going to stay chronological forever, so something that understands the order in which documents are put in is immutable unless I explicitly rearrange them would be good. Easy text searching through multiple file types to help narrow down a search faster, automated encryption and cloud storage backup, syncing between multiple devices. All the usual nice stuff you would expect for an app like this.

It could watch certain directories on your computer or in cloud storage and create a queue to suggest adding new documents that appear there in the same order of their appearance, that way you never forget to add an important document and they still get put in chronologically even if you haven't checked the queue in months. It could make different "vaults" you could use to separate documents by person, or separate work and personal life. Vaults could have long-term upkeep rules to keep them from getting bloated, like maybe you delete everything that's 10 years or older.

Basically if it can help me even if I have sloppy organization and take a ton of the pain out of it for me, I'd definitely be willing to pay a bit to try an app like that. Can't say for sure that I would stick with it, but it's a reoccurring problem for me as I have documents across multiple devices, cloud services, emails accounts, and thumb drives that I just can't make myself organize or create and maintain a system to do it for me.

I did this in high school, which was, in terms of school work anyway, pre-computer, so everything was paper all the time. I was aware of people's binders and notebooks and so forth, but somehow ended up just accumulating looseleaf paper folded up in my back pocket until I ran out of space and ended up throwing most or all of it out and starting over.

I might resume that practice, now that I think of it.

I've been using paperless-ng for a while. https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng

I have a Samba share that I added as a destination on my network scanner. I then tag them, add a correspondent, and never think about them again. PDFs that are sent to me are just uploaded and tagged the same way.

The paper copies are then thrown into a box in hopes I never need the originals.

I back up the document storage regularly.

Oh man, I knew it was dangerous to read this thread. Paperless-ng looks awesome.

You may have just convinced me to ditch Evernote.

Thanks to you next weekend will likely be a write-off :-)

I’ve been wanting to get off Evernote for years. I can see myself using this in combination with Obsidian.

What is driving you away from Evernote? I haven't found it really lacking, but I might be missing something.

Not the parent, but given they are moving to Obsidian I'd say it's motivated by a desire to self-host and rely less on cloud services.

You guessed correctly!

For me it's just painfully slow.

I think when it comes to organising work / papers / notes, etc., over time you converge to more and more minimal tools, that do some particular thing really well and really fast, rather than continuing to use a more locked-in GUI version that hides limitations behind ease-of-use. Evernote is great - you just might find that you'll outgrow it at some point and look for something with a bit more fine-grained control.

I'm speaking from the point of view of having looked at using all the different flashy to-do lists, all the different 'revolutionary' note taking tools (including Evernote quite extensively), and now using Obsidian, which is basically an IDE for markdown with ability to link files to one another.

The simpler tools force you to come up with systems of organisation / linking if you want to do something more complex, but that's the great thing - you get to build your own system incrementally to a point where it's something that actually works really well for you. It's also Electron, so you can write your own plugins!

It’s a desire to get off cloud based tools where storage of highly personal data is encouraged but without no-knowledge encryption in place, which is increasingly frustrating to me.

Especially for a company like Evernote who are no strangers to security issues.

I also dislike the “AI based” content suggestion crap or whatever that is. I don’t want that in my note taking tool. Things like that cross a line for me. It feels yucky.

And in general Evernote has totally stagnated as a product in my opinion.

I’d even happily pay them more money if the product fitted more in alignment with my use-case.

It’s really been great over the years but there is so much they could have done to keep it relevant and for me it just isn’t any more.

DropBox has gone a little in the same direction. An “originally great” disruptive product that sadly has bloated and stagnated without adding much more actual value on top of the original concept.

I wish Evernote was stagnate. Instead some product manager is trying to make a name for themselves and monkey patched a ToDo app in and made the UI harder to use.

What's border line criminal is the new version is WAY slower than the old one.

I do the same, and I bought a self-incrementing stamp that I use to give (paper) documents an ID. The originals are then sorted only by that ID.

That way, I don't need to have a date for every document.

By this you mean an actual physical self-incrementing ink stamp?

I’ve not heard of this before but it’s cool!

Physical, self-incrementing ink stamps are indeed cool. Sonme can be set to increase the number every 2 or 3 stamps, meaning that you can stamp an original and its copy with the same number by stamping them right after one another.

Can paperless ingest directly from cloud storage (Dropbox, etc)?

Doesn't seem like it: https://paperless-ng.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage_overview...

If your filesystem can see the cloud storage, yes. You can create a directory designated "consume" and it will pull whatever it finds and can handle from there. Maybe that doesn't qualify as "directly", but I don't find it a blocker since paperless needs a computer to run on anyway, so mounting a cloud provider (or NAS in my case) is not much extra.

Paperless periodically looks for and reads PDFs dumped into a folder. However it gets there (scanner writes to network drive, you copy a PDF to it, cloud storage daemon syncs a cloud folder's contents with it) does not matter to Paperless.

Agreed, paperless-ng is awesome. Coupled with a NAS for backup and a Brother 1700 Scanner to scan to network folder.

Another user of paperless-ng here. For a while, I used another open-source alternative Mayan EDMS - https://www.mayan-edms.com/.

As opposed to paperless, Mayan provides fine grained access control via ACLs and also allows 'directories' in addition to tags. Dropped it after a while though, since it was too enterprise-y and for in-depth configuration, the documentation was insufficient and I would have to buy the advertised book. Paperless-ng is sufficient for my personal use, though I still miss having directories as an additional level of hierarchical organization alongside tags.

Since I don't have a scanner, I just use the Microsoft Lens app to scan documents on my phone (Android). Paired with Syncthing (https://syncthing.net/), my documents are automatically synced to my desktop from where paperless-ng picks it up from the watched folder and automatically adds it. Tags and correspondents can be automatically added based on keywords in the text.

Is there a similar thing but for organising images? I have a bunch of image folders on my NAS but I would love it to be searchable, automatically tagged by certain criteria so I can filter them, etc. But self-hosted. I don't want to use Google Photos or Dropbox.

For photos, I find Lightroom to be great. But you're still going to have to spend some time on curation, metadata, etc. if you really want things to be findable.

You can find a bunch of alternatives here - https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#pho....

If you want features such as facial recognition, you might try taking a closer look at PhotoPrism/LibrePhotos. I did try them about a year ago, but in the end just went with the desktop app digiKam (https://www.digikam.org/)

This is a great resource, thank you!

I haven't used it, but stumbled across Damselfly [1].

From the About on GitHub:

> Damselfly is a server-based Photograph Management app. The goal of Damselfly is to index an extremely large collection of images, and allow easy search and retrieval of those images, using metadata such as the IPTC keyword tags, as well as the folder and file names. Damselfly includes support for object/face detection, and face-recognition.

[1] https://github.com/Webreaper/Damselfly

I'm building that! Some of the features that make PhotoStructure unique:

- self-hosted on docker, Linux, macOS, or Windows

- cross-platform libraries that can track assets across volumes without duplication [1]

- supports reading and writing to .XMP sidecars and Google Takeout JSON files [2]

- sophisticated image and video deduplication [3]

- quick and novel "samples" UI designed to scale to extremely large libraries (500k+)

https://PhotoStructure.com/why

[1]: https://photostructure.com/faq/what-is-a-volume/

[2]: https://photostructure.com/faq/takeout/

[3]: https://photostructure.com/faq/what-do-you-mean-by-deduplica...

Photoprism has been doing fine on me.

I have been trying teedy

https://github.com/sismics/docs

It stores everything into postgresql... filesystems are ok but it can get out of hand.

I am trying to deploy on microK8s with helm3

I scan all documents with a ScanSnap scanner connected to my mac and they are OCR'd immediately -- this is very efficient and fast.

Scanned documents go directly into DevonThink ( https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink ). DevonThink has a database of all my documents and keeps it indexed/searchable).

I have a Synology NAS set up with a WebDAV share. DevonThink syncs my document database with the Synology NAS via WebDAV automatically. I have several macs and mobile devices that use DevonThink -- each one configured to sync with my NAS. That way every single document can be found and accessed on any of my devices (via VPN). In addition, I can add a document to devonthink from any device and it will be sync'd to the NAS and accessible on all other devices.

The NAS has a HyperBackup task to back up my encrypted document database to BackBlaze B2, which is very cost effective.

This set up allows me to access all of my documents and search them from all of my devices. And my documents are not at risk of being lost because they are stored on the NAS (with redundant drives) and also backed up to cloud. It's been working great for years.

I have tried multiple times to ditch DevonThink, because i'd prefer to have a web application running on the NAS itself to manage document storage/database. But nothing comes close to devonthink IMO. And since I use a mac/ios devices, it's fine. But this solution would not work for windows/linux/android users.

I also have a SnapScan, but I never heard of DevonThink.

How does it compare to just sticking pdfs in folders? (That's what I currently do.)

What are the advantages of using DevonThink over manual sorting?

Ok this snapscan thing -- I've seen it mentioned a couple times. Why is it so good?

ScanSnap is good because you can set a stack of papers (dozens) in the paper feed tray, push a button, and all the papers will be scanned, OCR'd and a PDF created for you. It takes the pain away from scanning because all you have to do is insert stack of papers press 1 button, done. If you compare to a flat bed scanner (do people still use those?) or even a mobile device app scanner it is still faster every time.

Devonthink handles the syncing to NAS, and it also provides many other features for managing and organizing documents. I don't have the discipline to organize all my documents in folders. So instead I put it all in devonthink where i can easily search for document content or dates. I have documents for the past 10+ years that i can still find with a few keystrokes.

But Devonthink isn't free and if you'd rather self-organize on the file system and search via spotlight, that works too. I actually didn't want any of my documents to be searchable via spotlight. When i want to search for documents, i use devonthink -- i like that everything is in a separate place. I also don't want my kids to do a spotlight search and find important documents that could be nuked. So separating them was a feature for me.

I've been doing something very similar for nearly 10 years. I kept encountering documents that I might need later even though most of the time I would never need to look at them again. This way I can save all of them without having them take up any physical space. A down side is that initially there was a lot of scanning, but nowadays most documents are already electronic (e.g. credit car, bank statements) so I can just store them directly.

Same here, when i made the decision to go paperless I knew i wouldn't have the discipline to organize it all. So instead i opted to scan everything I thought i might want a record of and make it fully searchable. This way i can still find stuff easily and never have to organize it.

Came to write this. After trying multiple solutions Devonthink won. It's ages ahead of any competitors.

Instead of NAS I'm having WebDAV storage on one of my cloud servers. All my devices are synced via it.

A few years ago I bought a SnapScan ix500. It's a high-speed, autofeed scanner. Whenever I have a stack of important documents, or ordinary bills, I put the stack in the scanner, push the button, and they are scanned as a PDF.

I then move each scanned document into an appropriate folder. I have folders for bills, cars, instruction manuals, mortgages, receipts, taxes, ect. The folders are backed up on Google Drive, but I could also use Dropbox, Onedrive, iCloud, a NAS, USB key, ect.

If you're extremely lazy, there is some OCR and AI to try and infer filenames and make them searchable. In theory, you could just scan everything into a single folder and search it. (But I don't trust it.)

(I originally bought the scanner to scan old photos. Now I'm the goto guy in my family whenever anyone has a stack of photos they need scanned.)

I hand them to my wife.

This is partly a joke, but part sincere advice. I think one of the reasons our marriage has been such a joy is that we've been highly complimentary in areas like this where the little stresses of life can easily become big stresses for couples. When it comes to bookkeeping, keeping track of things, etc., she excels tremendously. But driving anywhere causes her a small stroke, and it happens to be something I thoroughly enjoy, and don't even mind in heavy traffic.

My wife and I have a very similar split. She actually enjoys organizing stuff - I can’t even fathom that such a person could exist.

My personal management style is to avoid being a hoarder. It can be a challenge, but really most of this stuff doesn't need to be kept long-term.

The main threat model these days is digital, rather than physical. I favor paper records, in a folder by tax year (sorted by month). The iPhone Notes app has a really good document scanner built in, if you need a digital copy you can create it, then delete it. For the house I have a house folder, for the car I have a car folder. I just pay cash for cars, so that really cuts down on documents needed (this kind of thing should be part of your decision-making process!).

> For the house I have a house folder, for the car I have a car folder.

I found that such an approach doesn't work for me. I currently own two cars but in the past I have owned over ten cars in my life. I keep purchase and sale documents for each car in a separate folder until no longer needed. I keep maintenance records in their own separate folders. When I sell a car I no longer need, I pass the maintenance records on to the buyer, and I easily locate the title to sign over in the purchase/sale folder from last time. Having these together wouldn't make sense because purchase/sale is a one-time event whereas maintenance happens all the time. For example, to answer the question should I accept my mechanics' recommendation to replace some given part, I review the documents and show them that they already replaced it last year, so they better have a really good reason why it needs replaced again this year.

Finally, there are other records related to cars such as insurance documents. These I just keep for one year only so having them separate in their own folder is a better idea to make it easy to prune out the old/no-longer-necessary documents.

Everything goes digital using a document scanner. I have a Fujitsu Scansnap, it connects to my computer via wifi so it doesn't have to be near my computer.

For digital, I use Google Drive, with rough organization of Taxes/2021, Taxes/2020, ..., Health, Family, Notes, etc. Don't obsess too much, you rarely go back in time so it's OK to keep it lightweight and optimize for the "now" when inserting and spend that little extra time searching later when retrieving.

The exception are things that are too tedious to scan (50+ page mortgage doc), are required to be paper for legal reasons (birth certificates), or sentimental items. Those are surprisingly few, and go into a hanging-folder plastic tub that has a waterproof gasket on the lid.

Most damage from house fires is the water from the firehoses, so it's important to protect from water damage first, then worry about fire damage if you keep your documents at the top of your home (attic). I store my document tub in the bottom of my closet, so it's relatively safe.

I would highly recommend using some automatic gdrive backup system. If you’ve read HN for a few years, you must have seen how occasionally Google makes an automated mistake and locks or even deletes your account and its data.

100% agree! I have local digital copies too :)

And honestly, I'm slowly de-Googling my life and will moving (or at least replicating) my online storage elsewhere.

I have a typical metal 3-row filing cabinet as would be common in companies until the last couple of decades (and is probably still heavily used). Each row has about 50 folders which is enough: everything is simply filed in the folder labelled by sender sender, ordered by receiving date front to back. A couple of 'tag' folders are used for things which aren't company-bound, like a folder for paper maps. One row is for me, one for my wife, one for common stuff. In total there's like 30 folders so searching is not an issue. If you have the space for it I honestly cannot think of something which would work better for me: doesn't take a lot of time to file, lookup is fast enough. Once in a while if I feel a folder gets too much content I just throw away the oldest papers. Not sure if you're supposed to, but I also don't care: the fat folders are usually not the important ones. I treat digital documents the same btw, except date order is automatic there.

Have one of those too, filled with Manila folders like the GTD book suggested and it is the single part of that book that I more or less consistently follow because it is essy and has great "ROI" for every minute spent.

I got mine free from a friend who hated it. One word of advice: do like the original GTD book wrote and use standing folders, not hanging flimsy ones.

Yep, for paper documents I have a 4-drawer filing cabinet, which I got cheap second hand years ago. It takes up some space, but the benefits over the years have been huge:

  - I always know where to look for a document (even in the worst case of not remembering which folder it's quick to scan through the folders and to look through the 'misc' folder).
  - I never have to think about whether to keep or throw out some letter or item -- I just file it, there's plenty of room. Every few years I have a shredding session to get rid of some of the ancient stuff and free up more space.

The important rule for me is that I never put anything in it unless it is really just reference material -- if I need to do something first I do that thing pretty quickly, or at least get an item in my todo list for it. And I set up automatic bill payment by direct debit so that I don't need to take manual action for arriving bills. So the filing cabinet works partly because 95% of incoming paperwork is "read in 30 seconds, file and forget" and I don't procrastinate the other 5% long enough for it to pile up.

My electronic document handling, on the other hand, is shocking:

  - documents scattered between multiple machines
  - no coherent folder structure
  - online statements usually stuck behind the web UI of each individual bank or utility, with no trustable archive

so I much prefer paper bills and statements to electronic...

A documents folder in [insert popular file synchronization service here]. Files go into house / bills / travel / personal folders, nothing fancy.

I only use it through the web, incognito mode, no desktop clients, never check 'remember password', and this is one of the few accounts that are not stored in my password manager.

Physical documents can be scanned using the Notes app on iOS, it can correct lighting and straighten the image, looks as good or better than a scanner and takes no time at all.

> I only use it through the web, incognito mode, no desktop clients, never check 'remember password', and this is one of the few accounts that are not stored in my password manager.

What's the reason for that?

Incognito mode doesn’t run extensions, so less chance of one snooping on your password. While the password manager is safe in theory, its used so frequently that there will be infinitely more opportunities for the master password to get stolen.

This, my email, and of course the pw manager are the three logins I never store anywhere.

+1 for a simple structure. I just use one folder per year (2015/, 2016/, ...) with everything inside.

> this is one of the few accounts that are not stored in my password manager.

I think this could be a bad idea. If it is not stored in your password manager, does your password have enough entropy, and get rotated enough, to actually be secure?

I hope you also use MFA

For those who scan and file digitally:

Are you worried about data security/malware at all? How do you protect your data?

Maybe I listened to too many Darknet Diaries episodes, but recently I've been thinking more about how to protect my personal digital documents. All it takes is one bad link or fishing email. Once a virus/trojan/ransomware is on the system, the attacker has a lot of leverage with everything scanned and neatly filed.

My idea is to use a separate laptop for archiving digital documents that is never connected to the Internet. Still a thought experiment at this point so I can't speak to the practicality (backups, etc.) of this yet.

> Are you worried about data security/malware at all?

Not really. I scan everything I get on paper, and put everything on Google Drive.

But it would be quite a lot of effort to dig through my hundreds (thousands?) of PDF documents that I have on that drive, and to find something that can actually be exploited and is worth more than what an attacker could get by just having access to my computer. An attacker can get my credit card numbers when I shop online, access to bank accounts when I am using online banking, get all my tax data when I file income taxes... I think that's far worse than anything that can be found on my Google Drive.

So I think having a separate laptop is overkill, unless you have something that's really more at risk than the data on the internet-connected computer.

> what an attacker could get by just having access to my computer

That's what I was referring to. Let's assume you store your scanned PDFs on your personal laptop and that gets compromised. Now the attacker has your medical history, tax and bank statements, contracts, ... your whole life to pick and choose the ransom amount.

I'm getting more and more to the conclusion that if you do not want something to be published on the Internet, do not put it on an Internet-connected device, smartphone or laptop -- or put the other way around: "expect anything that you keep on an Internet connected device (or cloud) to be potentially stolen from you". Too paranoid?

> Now the attacker has your medical history, tax and bank statements, contracts, ... your whole life to pick and choose the ransom amount.

But can't the attacker get most of that even without your PDFs? If the attacker can get access to my computer, the attacker can directly log into my bank account, access my insurance contracts... there is no need to access the PDFs, you can get most of the stuff directly by logging into the right site (or intercepting the session while I am logging in).

If an attacker has access to your computer, he should not be able to directly log into your bank account or insurance contracts. For me, both of those logins require the attacker having access to my 1Password account AND somehow have access to my phone (2fa). Please rethink your strategy if an attacker having access to your computer equals having access to your digital life.

If the attacker is on your computer, he can access your bank account while you are being logged in (and possibly after that, if he disabled the logoff). He just needs to copy your session cookies and use your computer as proxy to use your IP address. 2FA doesn't really help in that scenario.

2FA 'only' prevents attackers from breaking in without having access to your computer, and you being logged in. If an action needs to be confirmed using 2FA (like a transfer of money), it can prevent this as well.

Well, the alternative would be to either not scan the documents at all and keep them in the basement as hardcopies or to scan them and protect them somehow (for example by keeping them on a device that is not connected to the Internet).

VeraCrypt

I got a few storage organisers [1]. Each drawer is by person and broad category, sorted by date - new things go on top.

The categories should ideally have minimal overlap, so it's clear where they go.

Example categories are: home, car, banking/finance, legal, health, education, and ephemeral inbox.

In case of overlaps, it gets sorted by the organisation that sent the document, e.g. a bank loan about a car will be in the banking drawer, not in the car drawer.

The ephemeral inbox is for anything that only needs to be retained short term (<1 years), regardless of the category.

For any letter that requires an action, I will create a task in my to do list. I will then either file it in the ephemeral inbox or discard it if not needed.

Electronic documents are saved in Dropbox folders by category and year, and are prefixed by ISO 8601 dates.

1. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00KRAW9FC/

I scan everything pretty aggressively, since I hate physical papers of any kind lying around. Documents that are scanned within the last ~month sit unencrypted on a NAS, and organized in the style of "/2021/Taxes", "/2021/Bills", etc.

Periodically I take the current batch of unencrypted files and add them to a VeraCrypt volume, which contains files organized in this way, going back to around 2005. The encrypted volume sits on the same NAS. There have been surprisingly few times that I've had to "search" for an old document in the archives. And when I do, I can just go to the target year folder, and glance through the scanned images, and also make sure to give descriptive names to the scanned files, if it's important.

Once every few months I back up the encrypted volume to a gold-layered DVD disc (The encrypted volume is still nowhere near 4.7 GB), and store it in a cool, dark place.

How well does your scanner do in recognizing text? Is your archive searchable?

I've been stuffing things into Evernote for around a decade now but there recent changes to the Windows client means I'm probably done with that service. One thing that I love is how they find text in just about anything you upload and so the document can be found via search.

I'm also underwhelmed with the new Evernote clients. (IMO it's gotten worse on Android, too.) But I like Onenote even less. What are you looking at moving to?

I haven't found anything I like yet. Everything seems to be either web based or Electron.

There are some interesting macOS programs out there (DevonThink for one) but I'm not sure I want to buy a Mac just for that.

I have a scansnap and it's pretty much changed my life. The OCR is pretty good, and easy enough to do that my wife or kids can do it. Anything scanned automatically gets OCR'ed and placed in a family dropbox folder.

Everything is OCR'ed so I can search for it if I need something, and since everything is one folder, the next time I'm on a plane or at an airport or whatever, I just turn on a movie and spend time categorizing the files in the folder.

I've been using https://joplinapp.org, which is an open source Evernote alternative. It has Linux/Mac/Windows/Android/iOS clients, supports multiple sync methods, and end-to-end encryption. Truly a great app.

For the past ~15 years, I have scanned/saved documents in Evernote - and I do not file it in folders at all, but use their OCR feature, which lets me search inside documents.

Their scanner app on the phone let's me quickly scan a new document.

It is the best I have found so far.

I think Evernote have continuously gotten worse over the years (they keep adding "features" I do not care about), but at the core: Storing and indexing documents - I think it is still pretty great.

I scan everything into PDFs using Scanbot or SwiftScan or whatever that iOS app is called this month. It gets dumped into a Scanbot folder in iCloud Drive. Why? So I can access stuff from my iPhone.

Same thing with PDF statements, invoice, receipts, etc I receive via email or whatever. Goes into the giant folder.

Most of the time, I don't even bother renaming the filename to something useful like "Auto Loan Statement". The handy thing that Scanbot does is OCR the scanned content, so I can use macOS's Spotlight to easily pull up whatever I'm looking for. It works really well and I don't worry about it, anymore.

At some point, I may get an itch to run Spotlight queries and start dumping stuff into organized subfolders, but that itch hasn't come yet.

The one thing I break out into an individual subfolder are my yearly tax docs.

I've never been able to stick to an organizational plan involving renaming files with ISO dates (but in fact, Scanbot renames it with ISO date automatically) and organizing stuff into sub-folders. You're a better (wo)man than me, if you can stick with that, though.

Awesome. I will do this. I also need a way to ocr and save pdfs emailed to me that weren’t saved properly to have embedded ocr.

I shred them all. If someone thinks I need to keep an important document that's their problem.

> I shred them all. If someone thinks I need to keep an important document that's their problem.

Good luck when you get a tax audit, or need to prove ownership of some asset.

I scan everything with my phone and store in iCloud. I shred everything except what must be kept as paper originals (a few government documents). I stick this all into a single folder, and this folder is small since there are few documents that must be kept as paper originals.

It’s 2021, there’s no reason to have a filing cabinet of paper documents.

I just scan everything and put it on Google Drive. For a long time I used the all-in-one printer's built-in scanner (with ADF), but over the last years started I scanning with my mobile phone. On Android I used Google Drive's built-in scanning, but I just switched to an iPhone, so I am now using Genius Scan.

Regarding organization, I use a simple folder structure, e.g. /paper/insurances/car, /paper/taxes/2020, /paper/<kid-name>/school/ ... I try to use meaningful names for all documents, e.g. car-insurance-invoice-2020.pdf, so I can identify the right document as first glance. The depth of the folder structure for a file is depends on the number of documents in that category. Unless I misfiled a document, I have no issue finding documents.

Why does Genius Scan work better for you than something like Office Lens?

I am using Google Drive, so Office Lens won't help me. Google Drive on iPhone doesn't have a built-in scanning function (the Android app does). You need a different app for scanning. Genius Scan can export directly to Google Drive, that's why I am using it.

I do roughly the same thing, but I prepend every filename with YYYY-MM-DD for easy searching and sorting.

I am able to immediately throw away about 95% of letters, which I find takes away a real mental weight that came before from physically archiving and organising them.

I just wish Google would invest the relatively small amount of engineering effort that it would take to make their document scanner fast and accurate. The workflow for quickly scanning a multi-page letter is infuriatingly clunky right now.

---

Of course, the best solution is to just move to a country that has solved this problem at a national level. See Denmark and e-Boks, for example.

> I just scan everything and put it on Google Drive

In the future if/when google locks you out without recourse, how will that help?

I'm surprised to read through the comments so many responses relying on third party cloud storage as the primary location.

For anything important, you're best off treating cloud storage as convenient but ephemeral. It may go away any moment for any number of reasons and you might never get it back.

Be sure to have anything important in safer storage, whether local backups or just originals stuffed away in boxes.

For paper documents I get an accordion folder each year and label it with the year. Documents from that year are sorted based on what they're for. I'm getting to the point where I should be able to get rid of stuff from ~8 years ago and reuse the folders.

When I get rid of things I shred the documents.

For paper documents, I scan then using Scanner Pro on my phone. The phones OCR has become increasingly sophisticated. But the one thing I do do is title the document when I scan it with a fairly descriptive title and month date in the title. To reduce typing and speed up the process of scanning lots of documents, I use the voice typing feature.

For digital documents, I store then in a folder.

Scanned and original digital documents all go in iCloud with categories like - receipts - medical (self, spouse) - taxes - financial (etc.)

I know you didn't ask about photos and music but to me these are also important digital documents.

All photos are managed by the OS in the cloud. I backup the photo database using BackBlaze.

Music is again similarly managed by the OS in the cloud.

Everything important, which was not already send by e-mail, is e-mailed to myself. I use gmail. When something is still on paper, I make a photo. If it is just a file I got from another medium, I just attach it.

For note taking I prefer apple notes, but every once in a while, I just email the important notes.

Why e-mail? Because it is an open standard, it will be readable in the far far future. I can easily migrate to another provider, or make backups with imap functionality. I backup my gmail with another gmail account which I check yearly to keep it alive.

Email is also something which I always have at hand: on my phone, but I can also email to myself on another computer or from another account.

Mail search in gmail is also quite alright.

I feel your pain. Life seems to get more completed over time, especially when you’re managing properties, businesses, etc.

I scan everything with ScannerPro on my iPhone (which OCRs text to make it searchable) as items come in via mail etc. or print to PDF if I see myself needing something later. Scanned docs sync to Dropbox, and I move them to their appropriate Dropbox folder (e.g. property, taxes by year, biz, etc.) when I sit down at my laptop. It’s worked pretty well. I think the key is focus on the new docs, and you’ll eventually stop needing to refer to the old paper docs in your old folders (rather than trying to scan literally everything, which seems like a daunting task).

It might sound silly but what has worked for me for years is basically just having 3 boxes/folders. "todo", "done", "important". The first containing the docs I still have to act upon, second for things that I don't need long term, but can be useful to keep around for a while (bills, etc.) and the last one for things I do want/need to keep (contracts, work visa, etc.).

Everything is kept in chronological order. It isn't very fast to look up things up, but given I hardly ever have to access those docs I think I save more time not having to think about how to classify documents than the search once or twice per year for a doc.

I resonate with your second paragraph. The time necessary to file things with precision is not worth it personally.

I just name each document “yyyy-mm-did - description” and dump them into general categories like “finance”, “health records”, “misc”. If any folder gets unwieldy, I will create folders inside for each year and any additional folders that semantically make sense.

We have a family filing system in a set of file cabinets with pendaflex folders. But the past few years I scan (with smartphone) all significant documents received and upload to cloud storage. Then if I need a document (particularly for annual tax filing) I pull it from the cloud where it is indexed by name and creation time stamp.

In the case of documents that have a reliable internet service source (e.g. Amazon order receipts) I don't even bother filing or scanning. Instead I go get the document again from its source if I need it. Amazon keeps orders going back to the beginning, afaik.

The important thing is that you never lose anything. An accountant may have messy stacks of paperwork all over their office but they always bundle them together.

I have an inbox for mail. I throw out junk and envelopes and put things that are important-but-not-actionable in a plastic tote in chronological order. Bills go in there after they are paid. (By me)

Every six months or so or when tax time comes around my wife files the papers. She gets depressed doing it, but at least bills get paid on time because I don’t get depressed about filing paper in real time.

Kind of an aside, but if you are going to digitize important documents that contain confidential information, I would highly recommend encrypting them to mitigate any damage if your files were to be compromised. It adds an extra hurdle to accessing them, but is worth the peace of mind in my opinion. I can recommend VeraCrypt [1] as an easy to use encryption software for this purpose.

Additionally, I would also recommend backing them up offsite somewhere such as Backblaze B2 [2], making sure to encrypt all files there (even ones that are not encrypted on your local drive) using something like Restic [3].

[1] https://www.veracrypt.fr/code/VeraCrypt/

[2] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html

[3] https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403944998811-Q...

I find Cryptomator a better encryption solution.

Three-hole punch, pocket folders with brads in the spine, and three-ring binders. Each folder gets labeled with its subject, and everything relevant to the subject gets hole-punched and added to the folder. When the content outgrows the folder it gets moved into a binder that gets labeled on the spine. Documents sent digitally get printed and treated the same way.

For sheets that can't be hole-punched like a birth certificate or a car title, I use either the pockets in the folder or plastic page protectors that can go into the binder. For sections pertaining to specific events, like initial purchase and financing documents and maintenance visits for a car, I use tape tabs to mark the first page of whatever came out of that event. (You could use dividers made for three-ring binders, too.)

It's a good system; everything you need for it you can get just about anywhere, it doesn't take much maintenance, and lookups are pretty close to trivial. Too, unlike a filing cabinet, it's portable; if you need to take a set of documents somewhere (reference, tax preparation, etc), they are durably collated in a form that will easily withstand travel.

A few years ago I made a conscious effort to be as paperless as possible. I'm pretty much there now with almost everything I need accessible on my laptop.

I use a Doxie [0] scanner and scan absolutely everything meaningful: documents, receipts, invoices, physical photos, note from friends, Christmas cards, credit cards etc. Having a "scan everything" attitude means I don't have to think about what I do and don't scan. I try and save as many of these files as PDFs with OCR (which the Doxie supports)

Every week or two I dump all of the scans from the Doxie into my "Downloads" folder where I rename any files that have obvious content to something more meaningful (easier to search this way). Anything that needs to be manually filed (company documents for example) I do myself.

Everything else get automatically sorted using Hazel [1] after 2 weeks in the Download folder. They get sent to an "Archive" folder that is split into subfolders: PDFs, videos, images, music, design files, documents, etc. All files are automatically sorted into [year]/[month] folders.

This archive is great as it becomes a location for everything that doesn't have a home. For example I also perform a WhatsApp backup every month or two that adds all new photos and content that I've received from people into the same Archive. Likewise anything I've downloaded that hasn't been deleted or moved somewhere can be found there.

[0]: https://www.getdoxie.com/product/doxie-go

[1]: https://www.noodlesoft.com

My ex sorted all my documents for me, and the system works pretty well! It's an Ikea storage box (~14"x14"? they have a million of em), and she added these green file folder separators with little metal tabs on the ends, that hang on the edges of the box. Manila folders sit cradled inside the green separators. The manila folders have tabs for a label on top, and I'll put a category and year on the label. All I have to do is take out the box and all the labels are on top, so I can very quickly just see "Taxes" folders and look for the "Taxes 2019" folder.

When I move again I may digitize them by setting up a 'jig' using a piece of acrylic or glass from Home depot to flatten the pages so I can photograph them. Once that's done, I just keep a folder on my computer called "Documents" that gets copied to the cloud or wherever. Same basic filing system as the paper documents. One copy in the cloud and one on my computer, and every few years I make some kind of offline backup that I then forget about for years.

Over the time I have learned that best way to store is to optimise for retrieval - not for storage.

I dont recommend retrieval to do anything with OCR or Full Text Search. In my personal experience, simplest way to retrieve data is by date. If I am looking or 2018 tax records, I have already found the root folder(digital or paper). Fast enough retrieval, hmmm.

You may optimise as per you. I hope the idea helps.

In the words, or at least the sig, of Michael J. Mahon:

The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused.

If the original paper document must be kept it is filed in a small “house is on fire,” yet “burn proof” to-go folder.

Otherwise everything is digitized and shredded. iOS has a great scanner built into Notes, which can be exported / airdropped as a pdf.

Digital assets can be kept in a managed shared cloud folder like Dropbox or 1pw if containing secrets / identity matters.

I’m going to expand on OPs initial question and offer that organizing documents is one part of a personal database or personal data management system. I realized late in life that I needed a hierarchical organization of different kinds of data. Documents is one kind. I manage a file cabinet of folders (health, financial, family, vehicles, etc.) On an annual basis, some gets archived to bankers boxes, some gets shredded, and some stays in the file cabinet. I have a special metal lock box that has absolutely critical things and documents that, should the house catch fire, I’d take that out first.

But this is just physical records and the scope of it is getting smaller every year. Other data includes contacts, events, communications, negotiations, login credentials and their associated code words, URLs, etc. and other interesting information. Most of it is electronic. Most of it has been collecting for over 40 years. I have a search method that starts with Gmail or Google Contacts or Google Calendar or Evernote or LastPass. (For work these are replaced with MS Office365 equivalents) One or more of these usually comes up with either the root data or key attributes that I can use to search on again. Often I get a communication that has a date and a name associated, this leads me to a calendar event or a note in Evernote. I often make a note in Evernote that gives some context and maybe points me to a doc in a specific document or paper file folder (or bankers box).

It’s important that I use similar folder, tag, keyword, or category names in electronic file systems, email folders, and even paper folders. Eg. “Family/Jason/Health/Dental” or “Finances/Taxes/Taxyear2020/IRS”, etc. Lastly, the older I get, the more I commit to electronic records. Rather than remembering the names of an acquaintances children and the date their spouse passed away, I record this info in my contact for that person.

I only wish I had faithfully started this system when I was 20 rather than gradually since I was 40 years old.

I forgot to mention “relationships”, the most important piece of data. I store an acquaintance’s contact info in one place. I store a personal business or organization in another place. Sometimes the acquaintance has a connection to the same business. This needs to be captured. Eg. My neighbor and I are both members of the same HOA. He is the President, I am the treasurer. I sent him an annual report on date XYZ for meeting on date ABC. This info is stored in Contacts, online documents (spreadsheets), Calendar events, and email. I need to keep keywords that are consistent in all of these locations. (And notes).

I maintain a constantly evolving tree-based hierarchy of files. Everything I receive that's digital I store there. When things are tree-based, I scan and save in the same directory, or take a picture on my phone, and upload into the same directory structure on my Google Drive. My printer also scans, and stores in this structure - adding files to an incoming folder, I then filter.

On my desktop(s) I run insync, and allow everything to sync all over the place. A cronjob then runs that does a pdf2txt for any file, storing the contents in <directory>/.txt/<filename>.txt, blowing away all directories first. insync ensures these are up-to-date everywhere, within a ~30 minute time period.

I use ripgrep to search for content in files, when I can't remember things.

Then, because I'm a special level of worried, I maintain a backup of my Google Drive cache with SpiderOak. After all, one never knows.

I convert all incoming paper (worth saving) to pdf. From 2005-2020 I used a Fujitsu Scansnap; almost 1 year ago it failed (rollers finally turned from resilient silicone rubber(?) into goo, and replacement of these low-cost parts proved impossible). As a stopgap until a current-edition Fujitsu Scansnap went on sale, I started using Genius Scan app on my Android phone, which was quite satisfactory. 6-odd weeks later I bought Fujitsu Scansnap on sale. 2 weeks later I returned the dedicated scanner, as while I valued its sheet-feed capability, the quality of scans from the app was almost as good and I had become annoyed by the physical footprint of the scanner and having to take paper to it, vs scan anywhere (including on the road) with my phone. Compared to 16 years ago when I started "scanning everything", more entities I do business with are providing True PDF statements, etc., which means I do much less scanning of paper docs overall, and the app is quite satisfactory. Paradoxically, the app enables more scanning, of artifacts receipts and menus, that I seldom-to-never scanned prior to 1 year ago.

As far as storage: it all goes on my home (Samba) server with nightly (onsite) backup. Yes, this is a "hoarding" situation; it's easier to keep accumulating than to make (irrevocable?) decisions about what to delete. I know my backup solution is only robust against certain failures, but paring down the huge collection in order to make offline backup feasible means grappling with aging out the appropriate parts of it. This is on my to-do list... Also on my to-do list, once I establish a mission-critical doc-subset, is storing those docs on https://www.fidsafe.com/

edit: re organizing: it's all manual; pdf file(name)s are auto-prefixed with date-of-scan, and I rename to add a content-denoting suffix, plus move into a dir structure (which has evolved a bit). So, not very efficient, but still much better than pre-scanner (papers stuffed in 2 actual filing cabinets).

I have a filing cabinet with a folder for every company/entity that sends me paper. I file new paper at the 'front' of each folder, so each folder is arranged chronologically. If a folder starts to get too thick I ruthlessly discard anything more than a few years old.

I don't have very much of the paperwork. Just wanted to organize our home documents. So I have a script that gets the image from scanner, then crops, corrects skew and runs tesseract on it. Then saves it as pdf with text.

Then I've written a shitty tool to make a fulltext index of all the pdfs in the current directory https://git.sr.ht/~ghost08/pdfq (It doesn't have documentation or even a README so ...)

And then I search like so: `cd my/documents/path && pdfq index && pdfq search "my query"`, it just prints the file names which match the query.

Also for backup I use syncthing, so I have 3 copies of all my documents on 3 computers in my house.

I gave up on organizing, I try for form sake but have everything indexed with DEVONthink. For e-mail I use Mailmate which has a great search function. Together they make sure I can find my stuff wherever it may be. Works like a charm, but it's an apple only solution.

I have a system that has worked for 10+ years but is failing somewhat. This thread is a treasure trove of things for me to try next, but this is what I do today:

Pile up things to scan on dresser

Periodically scan them into Evernote using a brother mfp + MacBook.

Some things I scan from Evernote on iPhone

Occasionally tag things (esp tax related), but very little folders etc

Search as needed by keyword and time. For example, if I need a car bill, I should just search the name of the dealership and have it in the first few hits.

But, this has gotten slow and Evernote UI has gotten worse imo.

I’d really like something that was faster scanning - like 0 or 1 button presses ideally. And had automatic ingress for emailed docs like paperless statements, bills, etc. Then had smarts to automatically tag some, and had very fast search.

I can highly recommend Doxie[1]. I am using their scanner since many years without any problem and they have great support and a great user interface.

Workflow is Scan -> throw on a big pile (file very important stuff away) and discard everything once the scans are OCR'd and saved on my encrypted NAS share (for which I have a regular offsite backup).

As Doxies OCR works great and I use Docfetcher on my NAS for ultrafast search/retrieval, I don't need to tag anything manually or use different folders but can just "scan it away" without any manual edits which is a huge timesaver.

[1] https://www.getdoxie.com/

Apple Notes. Even though the editor could have had more features, haven't found anything that offers the same kind of convenience.

I don't really want to use Google for my personal documents, and I also don't want to use a web app to access them. It syncs across all devices and has a nice built in scanner and a few other nifty features.

We even use it for sharing notes between family members. If I go to the store, my wife might send me a shared note with "collab" mode where she will see each item I have ticked off.

Before that I used Evernote, but they lost half my notes. As a non paying "customer" I couldn't really complain.

Organize files by ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD.whatever you want.pdf). I learned this somewhere in the beancount plaintext accounting guide ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Tss0IEzEyAPuKSGeNsfNgb0B... )

It may be an upfront effort to get going if you have a morass of documents, but helps later on when searching for things. There's old command-line tools like 'qmv' if you want to easily do bulk renaming within a text editor.

I have a git repository configured on my local NAS with documents sorted in folders based on information category. Electronic documents are copied, physical documents are scanned. The repository has an active-active backup that's updated daily through an rsync script. This repo is also cloned on multiples of my day-to-day devices. Such a workflow ensures the following:

1) Any machine I use is only a pull away from the latest

2) Having a repo lets me track history and use search functionality based on repo tags. It also provides versioning for documents.

3) Each clone on each machine acts as its own backup.

4) The NAS is mirrored, the active backup is also mirrored.

Sounds awesome. Can you share a template for this (if it isn't too much of work)?

I've got myself a multi function printer with an adf. Everything that is in my physical inbox is scanned and put on my NAS.

There is a custom program running in a container that will feed any new doc to pdfsandwich (or similar OCR tooling), move the doc into a digital inbox prefixed with the current date. From there I can either leave it as it is (the date is usually good enough to find things) or - if I get to it - give it a proper name and put it into a folder structure (like some of the other responders).

The custom tooling also indexes all docs and provides my family a web interface to search.

Simple and effective.

Delete everything I don’t need to keep right away. (And if I have downloaded the files and saved/backed up I delete the emails as well).

Throw anything in the bin that I don’t need or something I can get easily if needed.

If a paper document might be needed for longer or getting another copy might be an issue then scan it.

I name the files and folders appropriately often appending to existing names.

Repeat a cleanup on existing documents, both paper and digital, regularly. A lot of documents loose their importance over time - either they literally expired or you overestimated their importance or have just lost value.

Scanning documents.

Also I've been trying https://stack.area120.com/ which is a google product. You can scan a document, and then tag it (tags vs folders), and you can have multiple tags on a document. So scan, tag insurance + medical, and then you can search by tags etc. You can also add key/value pairs for important information. For instance, you can add a claim number to the insurance doc, or a telephone number etc. Seems to work pretty well so far.

Noguchi sans envelopes, just with file folders.

http://www.synthstuff.com/mt/archives/individual/2005/10/the...

https://caveblogem.wordpress.com/2007/01/19/a-folksonomy-for...

Paperless + a custom telegram bot I wrote that receives any document I sent to it (usually taken with an app called Notebloc)

The bot names and places the file in the right folder for paperless to ingest.

Getting to documents into my AWS S3 folder is not a problem: I use a scanner or the Adobe scan app on on my phone to drop the application into my folder which syncs to AWS S3.

My biggest issue is finding those documents like "oh its tax season -- where is the receipt for the stuff that I bought from Staples " or "where is the reciept for the medicine I bought so that I could file it for the insurance reimburesment" .

I am hacking away using AWS ML APIs but so far I am not happy with my results.

I've found - after trying several apps and custom scripts to do OCR - that the easiest most convenient solution is to just get a printer/scanner combo that does the PDF & OCR directly in hardware. That usually means something targeted towards SMBs that works standalone (in my case a Canon). I.e. specifically not a consumer device: the consumer units usually rely on separate client-side software for doing the OCR processing which complicates the workflow.

I don't have a great filing system, but it has been sufficient so far: have all documents in the same folder, put their respective date in the filename together with some tags ("yymmdd_name_and_tags.pdf"), and convert scans to searchable PDFs with "ocrmypdf" on Linux.

The date and comprehensive filename is often enough to find a document, but additionally I can do a "full text search" on all documents with the text layer that is put onto scans by the OCR.

Most documents are digital. When they aren't I scan them. Then I store them per year of creation, except for a few special folders like house related and job related.

Things I know I will need in the next month get scanned and sent to Notion - Tax Docs go to a folder on my desk

Everything else I place in a large pile on the side of my desk - once it looks like it's going to fall over I go through everything, throw out what looks useless and put the rest in a separate pile. Every once in a while I scan the separate pile documents to OneNote and shred them. It's worked surprisingly well for the past 15 years or so.

I got so fed up with having the info I care about spread hither and yon that I started building my own Personal Knowledge Management (tm) app. It's basically a searchable bucket of JSON-LD docs, plus binary attachments, in a PouchDB database. I put info in via command line, PWA and browser extension them search it more or less the same way.

I'm gonna do a Show HN on it one day because it seems like a lot of people have the same problem as me.

I scan them all in as searchable PDFs. Home/Docs/2021/Personal/Bills/Utilities/Water/202111.pdf Home/Docs/2021/Personal/Insurance/Home.pdf Home/Docs/2021/GION/Bills/Mobile/Pixel6/202111.pdf Home/Docs/2021/GIOV/Bills/Mobile/Pixel4a5G/202101.pdf where GION & GIOV are Games Inc. of Nevada & Virginia

I have a document directory, and subdirectories by genre, for instance docs/homes/{redacted,...}/construction/{invoices,agreements,legal,info} I don't think I've had any paper documents, but if I did, I'd scan them and place them as png's in the right place in the directory structure, I won't need to search for their content, but I do give them useful names.

This folder is backed up.

I have a physical folder of important vital documents (passports, birth certificates, Social Security cards, etc.). Other stuff I usually just take a picture of on my phone and email to myself with a heading of some words that I know I'll think of in the future (e.g. for a car repair "Sienna lock stuck repair car Pepboys" or something like that). Works pretty well for me!

For physical files, I have a file cabinet for "short-term" stuff (and/or things that I don't care if they get burned in a tragedy (or that I plan TO burn when their usefulness expires))

For "long-term" "important" files, I have some fire-resistant safe boxes

For "really-important" stuff, I use a gun safe (this list is incredibly tiny)

If it's a document that occurs once a month or less often, I put it into "yearly" folder, if I know that's something that fits into specific "context" (like, company bills or something) I put it into that specific contextual folder (which is also stacked per year). All of them I put into dedicated steel cabinet for documents.

>>>How do you organize your personal documents? Do you digitze them somehow? Do you have a great filing system? I want to know.

How are these details being digitalized? By whom? Where? When? How often? WHY? How may I access:

1. what are my data rights?

2. How evaluate.

3.. how to corroborate?

4... How verify?

5. .... How expunge?

6.... How to not streisand the fuck out of people?

7... What specifically are my deets that are protected under law that I may defend vs not

If you want to start scanning your documents but can only scan one side at a time with your automatic document feeder (ADF), I wrote a small tool to merge the PDFs automatically: https://github.com/RomainGehrig/PDFCollate

Since the majority of my personal documents are digital, I simply put them in folders that make sense. I encrypt with VeraCrypt.

There are some paper documents that I do not bother to digitize. I keep these in a small filing cabinet in actual physical folders.

The trick is simply memorizing which documents go into which folders.

I scan my paper documents then give them a meaningful name and drop them into a folder. I just give them a name that I can search for later and maybe create a folder for related items (car, job).

You can organize it better, but the truth is that search works well enough and you are probably not going to need it.

Shameless plug but relevant. Our startup addresses just this issue - https://www.trustworthy.com

Beyond just managing personal documents, there’s always the question of access to these documents by loved ones or other trusted people.

I have a small filing cabinet with tabbed, labeled folders for each area of my life: house (mortgage, insurance, etc), me, my wife, car insurance, etc. It's old fashioned but it works incredibly well. Anything I may need to access away from home also gets scanned into Evernote.

Scan all paper documents using a ScanSnap; it produces searchable PDF.

Throw those as well as any digital documents into my google drive.

If I need a document, it's just a search away. Literally zero time organizing or filing; I just count on the fact that google drive search is pretty good.

I have a filing cabinet with two drawers. Inside are many folders, each dedicated to a particular specific subject - car loan documents, 2018 tax documents, etc.

Those folders are grouped together by broader subject - loan documents, tax documents, etc. - in alphabetical order.

Do you have a second backup copy somewhere?

No, I don't.

However, the most important documents I've digitized and keep in a secure digital datastore.

In a file system.

By familial entity (family, mum, dad, kids)

Then By year/month/day (bills) Or time independent (diploma, ...)

Then if I need to organize a document for my family auto

- the contract goes to family > auto

- the bills go to family > yearmonth > yearmonth_auto_provider-name.pdf

A search on the tree on file name is enough for us.

Digitize - i use the document scanner feature in Onedrive but there's plenty alternatives. This is better than just a photo - uses less space, crops the image automatically and increases contrast of text on the page.

The digitized versions then go into a PARA system.

I usually take pictures with my iPhone. But I wish there were a simple way to use the photo app in a different way, to store these specific pictures in a different folder, etc, and separate them from regular photos.

Scan everything and store in paperwork, https://openpaper.work/en/ Then encrypt and backup to local external disk and google drive.

For short documents (~1-3 pages) I use a scanning app on my iPhone to scan them as a PDF, after which I store them in my Password Manager (which can also store docs), with appropriate filenames and tags for easy searching.

Scan to searchable PDF. Dump in folders named for the year the document is relevant/scanned. I never need 99% of it, but when I do need something, search usually finds it or gets me in the neighborhood.

Put them in ~/Documents and search with Alfred

https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/unix/my-file-system

I scan all documents to searchable PDFs and file them by year. MacOS lets me easily search a group of folders by their contents, so I just use keywords to find the document(s) I am looking for.

Except for birth cert, passport, and ss card - totally paperless. Scan everything instantly. Maybe a little fanatical but it really keeps my head clear.

OT: iPhone comes with a documents scanner in the box. It's called Notes. Tap new note, click camera icon, choose documents.

I just commit everything into my note git repository.

I thought I need a OCR, but my folder structure is enough.

It’s simple reliable and will exist in 20 years.

Scansnap ix500, scan to pdf with ocr, save to google docs, all in same folder, search what I want via browser interface.

I used to use nextcloud but I'm currently using just a ssd over wifi as I use this as a backup

I make a pdf of every important e-mail and save them in a folder structure on my iCloud account.

check out paperless and get a document scanner. Really helps https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng

I use the Google Drive app to scan documents into PDFs with my phone. I give them descriptive names and put them in a folder hierarchy that makes sense. It works pretty well. It might not be OCR'd for text search or anything but all I really need it for is to hold onto things in case a boomer org requires me to pony up a PDF (taxes, medical records, etc).

Anything I think I'll need or want to keep gets scanned, everything else is shredded once it is no longer useful. Paper docs are almost guaranteed to get lost - the only paper docs I intentionally hold long-term are things I don't want to lose in a fire, in a bug-out bag.

I haven't gotten around to it yet but I intend to eventually back up the critical documents locally or in some other cloud service to prevent random Google account locks from totally crippling me.

paperwork is simple and reliable: https://openpaper.work/en/

I'm married with two kids, and my wife and I run a SAAS business together. While we try to automate/digitise as much as we can, you just can't get away from paper - there's always masses of it. We've come up with a filing system that is low-touch and works for us.

You need a proper filing cabinet with two drawers [1]. You then set up the document holder inserts like so:

Top Drawer: Urgent, Important, and then months: Jan, Feb, March etc for two years

Bottom Drawer: One section for each category you want. Just make them up as you go along - Mortgage, Car, <Kid 1> Health, <Kid 2> Health, etc etc. Don't overthink it - you can always just relabel them if you change your mind. We also colour code a bit, so e.g. company stuff is red and personal stuff is blue.

The System:

When receiving a new document (usually when opening the post, but obviously could come from school/doctor/whatever):

1) Is it something you need to act on? If so, put it in Urgent

2) Is it something you'll need imminently (e.g. a doctor's letter that you need to remember to take to an appointment in two weeks' time)? If so, put it in Important

3) Do you need to keep it? If so:

   3a) Does it have an obvious and immediate home in one of the categories in the bottom drawer? If so, put it there
   3b) Put it in the current month

4) Can you just bin it? If so, bin it.

5) Not sure what to do? Just put it in the current month and move on with your life

Once a day/week/whatever works for you:

1) Is there anything in urgent that you can act on? If so, do it. You'll likely then either post it, move it to Important, or put it in the current month

Where the hell is that stupid letter / form / aargh I'm supposed to be leaving in five minutes

1) It should be in Important or Urgent

2) Look back through recent months, you'll probably find it there

Once a year / once every two years (we do this in the gap between Christmas and New Year)

1) Go through all the months, and either move them to a category in the bottom drawer, or bin them.

Because you only do The Big Chuck Out once a year, you can put the time into getting it professionally shredded. For this reason, I often only chuck proper rubbish (flyers, ads etc) and file everything else so it gets shredded.

We had various combinations of ring binders / document wallets / etc etc and eventually they fill up or you run out of them and don't get around to buying more (plus they start getting bulky once you have a lot of stuff). The filing cabinets are a lump, but they hold a LOT of stuff. Since using it, going through post / being given forms is quick and painless, and we haven't lost anything.

[1] https://www.bisleydirect.co.uk/bisley-bs2e-flush-front-filin...

emacs org mode and dropbox

testing

test2

Physical documents I take a photo and then use syncthing to transfer. Then I either batch them up into a zip file or just drag and drop that one photo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com