I have looked at paperless in the past and just asked why? I just spent a little time setting it up to see what it was about, then I spent hours configuring it and my email server creating paperless email addresses that other emails forward to! I cannot believe I have lived this long without it.
The main problem with Paperless is me. I just can’t be arsed to scan stuff, even though it’s almost entirely automated. The only thing that isn’t automated is me putting the paper into the scanner. Why am i like this?
I felt like a grown up once I got my paperless-ngx setup up and running.
I have a Scansnap ix1600 scanner. Everything is automated once I insert a document and click the button to scan it.
- Scanned documents are saved to an SMB share on my home server - it’s a built-in feature on the scanner.
- Paperless-ngx is watching that folder and grabs the files.
- Paperless-ai uses AI to add metadata to document (title, tags, correspondent).
For documents I need to keep a physical copy of, I give each document a consecutive ASN (archive serial number) using QR code stickers. When importing the document, paperless-ngx sees the barcode and attached the correct archive number to the document.
If I need to find the physical copy, I first find it in Paperless-ngx, look at the archive number, then look in a folder where the documents are arranged by archive number. Easy.
I still feel like I’m living in the future using Paperless though I feel I must use it differently to everyone else as i haven’t felt the need to automate everything as it doesn’t always tag things to match my own specific tagging system.
For those that do automate everything, how do you overcome naming of documents? I want the scanned documents to have human readable names rather than the naming format of my scanner (or phone on occasion) or the naming format of XYZ company emailing me a document because in a catastrophe situation I want to be able to easily find & retreive vital/important .pdf docs from a backup rather than having to think about replacing equipment to set up Paperless again (in my instance aside from nightly Kopia snapshot backups I also export Paperless backups on device plus a secondary backup is automatically moved to a separate drive on my network & a third copy is encrypted & stored off site).
I run a small it company. Each month I have to sort all tax relevant documents and hand them to my tax office.
So I download the tx CSV from my accounts. Those get parsed and the relevant invoices get searched in paperless, so I see if something is missing etc with a few minutes of manual work.
I haven’t looked into Paperless much, but what does your workflow look like exactly with regards to the emailing part?
I got an unlimitted email package from a host, before my journey into self hosting. I use a different email address for everything I sign up to or need to confirm I am human with. They all forward to 6 or 7 different emails I check I have just decided that those email addresses would forward to paperless email address to keep stuff sorted.
*edit I get next to no spam, if I do I either close the email or tell the company they have had a data leak and close the email.
Hold on, I’m a little confused. Are you talking about paperless the document management software (and it’s ng/ngx forks) or a different software with the same name?
Because you can set up mail inbox processing in that software but I’m not sure how that connects to forwarding to multiple different mailboxes, or vice versa profit from merging multiple forwards.
Sounds like OP does something similar to what I do. They setup different email inboxes or catchalls for different services, then as email comes in it gets forwarded to paperless for OCR/search maybe?
I do this with paperless-ngx, where I forward some emails to a dedicated address that paperless watches. But I do this manually with emails that have important PDFs attached.
I’m not sure what the benefit is of automatically forwarding everything to paperless. Seems like duplicating emails unnecessarily, when email clients already have search/folder functions. Also email servers have mail rules so they can be sorted based on sender/recipient/subject/etc…
Yes it is something like this, I do not have all of my emails go to paperless-ngx that would probably kill my little home lab.
I deal with a lot of financial and insurance things, having them go automatically to paperless-ngx was the plan but then I saw what I could do with automation and I spent hours setting up automation. As this is all new to me and I am dealing with some recent flooding I did not want to need to remember to start forwarding things I needed saved as pdf’s.
The automations include things that should not be forwarded to the paperless accounts, then each of the paperless accounts have rules on what to block if something slips through.
I solved it for me by sorting by attachment off I’m thunder thunderbird Desktop once a week and then just drag and drop to the second account which gets consumed by paperless. It’s nice that imap can do that with drag and drop
I forward emails to my paperless address, and never thought of using drag/drop. How does this work for you? I remember having trouble getting paperless to see emails that were already read, or otherwise it would constantly try to reupload the same files. Do you watch a specific folder and then have paperless move to a different folder on consumption?
It’s a paperless exclusive email that importa everything that is in the inbox. But I guess it would also import from a specific folder. Unread or read doesn’t seem to make a difference
I have an paperless account and shared it with my user, but you can also just integrate 2 accounts in one email client.
Guess I should create a sieve filter to look for relevant mails and auto-copy
Asked myself which documents I have to keep for how long. I found this German Verbraucherzentrale article (Google translated) about document retention times.
But that information doesn’t give me a workflow. What are your workflows for new documents to scan(tags, correspondent, unique number). How do you keep track of out-aged paper which can be disposed? What’s your pdf backup strategy?
If it’s digital, I’m keeping it. A scan it’s just a few kilobytes. And for a normal private person, the storage amount needed is absolutely minimal. Even if you get one important document per mail per day and scan it with a 1MB filesize, you’re looking at 365MB per year. If you’re 20 right now and are looking at a life expectancy of 85, that would be 365MB*65 = 23GB of storage.
You are right. Backup and storage of scans should be not a big deal.
But the paper documents:
Some things like birth and education certificates need to be kept indefinitely. Some documents like receipts need to be kept for a while. Some documents can be discarded after scan and some are PDFs entirely.
I. E. How can I tell from the scan if there is a paper document and where is it stored?
Or How do I age out paper which is not needed any more?
In my case I’ve taken the really important stuff like birth certificates, etc., and put them into its own folder. Everything else is going into a simple box. I’m not getting that many documents by snail mail. It’s actually quite easy to find the physical document: I know from the scam that I’ve received the document on first of June two thousand eighteen. So I can go back to two thousand eighteen June and then there are maybe two or three documents which I’ve received in that time frame. You can also simply write an ongoing number on the document.
And how do I tell from the scan if there is a paper document? My scanner is naming those PDF in a typical method. If it is called Receipt_000123.pdf, I know that it is coming from my scanner and that there is something physical
I’m not aging out papers. I’m still on the first box, so everything is okay storage wise.
For backups I use Borgbackup with Borgmatic, to two different storage VPSes (hosted by two different providers in two different regions).
I posted my paperless backup strategy here: https://lemmy.world/post/46429607
As for retention time, in digital I don’t care. Storage is cheap enough for that amount of data.
Paper I tend to only keep very important documents, but haven’t done a full inventory scan yet.
Which comment is yours? I don’t see your username.
