Paperless-NGX
github.com
github.com
Now that Paperless-NG seems to be going unmaintained (last commit on 15th Sep 2021), Paperless-NGX has been created with a focus on an org, so that the continuity of the project can be maintained with a simple path for the original creators to join back if they want to.
I don't think the community could have handled this better!
2. I can't effectively OCR them for many non-English language (at least - unless it's made some advances in OCR for some languages for which it's lacking). Also, if I do OCR anything, I then need to correct the mistakes, which takes a h-u-g-e amount of time even when the OCR works relatively well.
- The scanned documents are stored in the filesystem in PDF format, so you can certainly access them without going through the web application.
- OCR doesn't have to be perfect, because it's just being used to locate a specific document when you need it. So if you have 1788 documents and you want to find your apartment lease, you search for "lease" and there's a very good chance that word will be found in the correct document. That's the whole point - storing documents with a low amount of manual effort, in a way that makes it very easy to find them when you need them.
Also, you can flexibly configure how it stores the actual documents. So at the end of the day if you don't like the program, it gracefully degrades to a bunch of PDFs organized into a nice folder hierarchy that's easy to back up.
I'm waiting for one of these apps to monitor a video stream from a camera and automatically determine when a new sheet is ready to scan.
I already have a mobile app that can find the edges of the paper, crop it, and OCR all its contents. But it still needs me there as a human to tell it "the page you're pointed at now is one you haven't seen before" when that determination should be far simpler than doing OCR.
I'm waiting for the day I can aim my phone or webcam and just flip through a bunch of pages and have it scan each one as it appears. It doesn't have to be super fast like Data from TNG or Johnny Five from short circuit, I just want to go from "flip, press, flip, press, flip, press" to "flip, flip, flip"
If you don't have that much volume...just improve the physical UI. Whatever floats your boat: a foot pedal, capacitive switch, Clapper, etc.
Especially when there is no technological barrier that keeps us from having software do it automatically. I'm not going to buy gear to do something I fully expect the software to be capable of in the next year or two.
Until then, searching paper with my eyeballs once in a great while is less work than procuring and maintaining a document feeder or pressing a button three thousand times, no matter how convenient that button is.
This is a great reminder for me to migrate ;)
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/tbcuf0/announci...
It’s the 2nd fork, with -NG being the first one. They each rose up when the former version became unmaintained.
Some additions: I found that black-and-white scans at 300 dpi work for almost all documents, resulting in a small file size and decent readability. Occasionally I switch to gray and 200 dpi and rarely to color. After looking up how long the originals of different types of documents need to be kept for legal reasons, I settled simply for the maximum time (6 years in my case) and file documents in a binder, sorted by the year in which I can discard them. Then, at the beginning of each year, I can get rid off one section of the documents which are older than 6 years. There is a second binder for active contracts (insurance etc). As soon as one of them ends, it goes into the first binder. I‘ve started organizing my Downloads folder in a similar way - sorting stuff by when I think I can delete it (either because it‘s not relevant any more or because I simply never touched it), typically a few months in the future. Both systems have helped to keep the clutter low and.
I know this strongly depends per country, but could anyone else share real-life experiences of going paperless?
From my understanding, if there is a sheet of paper that has special meaning, presumably you must be able to produce the original, with wet stamps and signatures, upon request (since any copy can be created from scratch digitally). So I keep loads of papers I am afraid to dispose of.
In my case, I simply settled for the maximum of all the different periods I encountered and file originals by the year after which I can trash them and use the digitized versions for actually working with them (e.g. my tax declaration is now much faster to do). For Germany, I found that 6 years grace period should be fine. 10 years, if you're self-employed.
I bought a simple self-incrementing stamp, which I stamp all incoming documents with. When adding the document to paperless-ng, I set the document's number accordingly, and finally I file the paper away purely sorted by ID (so I have a (physical) folder titled 1-101, one 102-231, etc.). When I need the original to a document, the lookup is very fast, and when I know I won't need the original ever again, I don't stamp it and tag it as "digital only" in paperless-ng.
1) Stamp it with the pagination stamp.
2) Scan it.
3) Dump the scan into a single large digital folder.
4) Dump the original into a physical folder (titled as you do).
For me I just scan everything and than put it in a binder with a label (like 2022-1) and put the same label on the digital document. This way I still have the document and will be able to find it if needed, but I don’t have to worry about where to put it. They all just go into the same binder until it is full.
Both are interesting challenges, but focusing on the second one - I don't see why it should be tied-in with scanning. It's actually something that I feel is missing in operating systems, or at least desktop environments: The ability to arrange your files in more than one way, rather than having to force them into a static hierarchy ... while also not having them lost behind some piece of software which prevents direct access.
I wish all common operating systems supported labels/tagging in a compatible, easy-to-migrate manner...so that a person could migrate from windows to linux or back again, and all their file meta data - like file labels, file tags! - was preserved.
Or maybe a desktop + a mobile version that are synced without a server, so you could still be able to use your phone to scan new documents.
It's a bit of an old paradigm, though - powerful, client-side, offers a lot of freedom and therefore wants you to put in manual work for setting up a system. I love it.
My thinking recently has been on the storing items in a way that will last. It seems every year another SaaS gets bought and/or shutdown. Text based storage (Obsidian/Markdown) and desktop/foss apps are one way to combat that.
Edit: Should work, but takes several minutes before the web UI becomes available. We do provide the logs for such cases. Most other apps are easier to deal with. :-)
We have a few environment variables (https://baserow.io/docs/installation%2Fconfiguration) that can be tweaked for this image to make it start-up faster and with a lower resource footprint:
- `SYNC_TEMPLATES_ON_STARTUP=false` to turn off the initial load of example Baserow templates. Our template collection is growing and the loading of this into the database is probably what is causing the several minute startup. This will be optimized in the future.
- `BASEROW_RUN_MINIMAL=true`. This will combine two of the backend async queue processes into a single one. This might result into higher priority async tasks getting stuck behind slower tasks (an large import/export might slow down the broadcast of realtime events for example). But this tradeoff is perfectly reasonable in most small self hosted environments.
- `BASEROW_AMOUNT_OF_GUNICORN_WORKERS=1` to reduce the number of concurrent backend api processes from the default of 3. Once again this might cause a degradation in performance for higher volumes of traffic, but a tradeoff worth considering if memory etc is a concern.
This image is brand new and because of it's multi-process nature is hiding some interesting complexity. We are still working out the kinks and a sensible set of defaults. It's also very easy for us to offer different variants of this image with different defaults set. Any feedback, suggestions or questions are very welcome here or at http://community.baserow.io.
Using docker.io/baserow/baserow:1.9.1 currently.
For now the image is marked as "experimental". And I'm looking into channeling future issue reports from apps in a more structured way and maybe keep app settings on Github for editing and reporting issues against. Without duplicating upstream efforts of course. Still lots of work to do here.
I think you should cross-promote PikaPods more, and prominently, based on the popularity of your BorgBase. I noticed the following in my backup report, and that raised PikaPods' profile in my opinion; so I might cut PikaPods some slack, and try it again.
> The team behind BorgBase is launching a new container hosting service for open source apps...
Thanks for sticking around for now. I still have many improvements planned, like making it easy to report deployment bugs and suggest changes to settings. Like new env vars, ports, images, etc.
Does this provide similar or better yet, better functionality?
If I scan my days mail in one go.. say water bills, property expenses etc in one batch.. will this then sort the water bill from the telephone bill in what is saved?
Ps. Bills contrived for illustration I receive much more of this online these days but still paperwork abounds.
So if you enter something you know is on the water bill then it'll come up in the search, such as the name of the water company.
I've never used Evernote so I'm not sure it's better but I had no problem finding stuff so far.
Also you can tag documents and search by tag so you have that too.
Paperless kicks ass.
Haven't tried it yet, but it looked good so far
I clicked through the documentation and I don't understand how easy/hard it is to make cloud backups and do disaster recovery.