[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document h...
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       Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?
        
       My SO uses iPhone and I use Android, I think we'll both soon go mad
       with all the pictures of the documents sent to post that we have to
       take a digital action for.  Contracts, Appliance Invoices,
       insurance, Kids' documents, Receipts, Fines, government documents,
       bills, tickets, passes etc. Are basically taking ages to find, even
       if we were wise to take a picture would take ages to refind.  I
       have both OneDrive and Dropbox, the UX is horrible for these simple
       searches. I know that Shoebox exists, but paying at least 18$ a
       month for wanting to store my documents on my phone in a neat way
       looks to much of a demand for me. (and that has a limitation). I'm
       not even asking for a fancy OCR.  Is there an app out there for
       this? What do you use?
        
       Author : sidarok
       Score  : 8 points
       Date   : 2022-02-06 21:39 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
       | evanlivingston wrote:
       | I use a printer, a filing cabinet, hanging folders and manila
       | file folders. I could never dream of doing anything else.
        
         | jimmygrapes wrote:
         | Don't forget a copier for receipts printed on thermal paper
         | that become blank after a year!
        
       | inthegreenwoods wrote:
        
       | tacostakohashi wrote:
       | I use (two levels of) directories, and filenames:
       | 
       | appliances/fridge/2018-01-03-purchase-receipt.pdf
       | 
       | appliances/oven/2019-11-18-repair-invoice.pdf
       | 
       | medical/insurance/2022-02-03-insurance-card.pdf
       | 
       | automotive/registration/2022-09-10-registration.pdf
       | 
       | automotive/tickets/2019-09-10-parking.pdf
       | 
       | phone/t-mobile/2020-01-14.pdf
       | 
       | phone/pixel5a/2021-03-14.pdf
       | 
       | With two directory levels, you should be able to organize it so
       | that all the top level directories fit on one screen of ls output
       | / file explorer or whatever you want to use, as well as each
       | second level.
       | 
       | I always prefix the filenames with YYYY-MM-DD, and I add a suffix
       | with any extra keywords that might be helpful or to disambiguate
       | several things from the same day, but in many cases it's obvious
       | if the directory is just full of one bill per month or whatever,
       | in which case I just do the YYYY-MM-DD.ext filename.
       | 
       | The system is largely optimized for having a place/filename to
       | store things without too much thought, rather than retrieval
       | since 90+% of things you store never actually need to look at
       | again, and I don't mind clicking around for a few minutes for the
       | rare occurrence when I do need something.
       | 
       | If you put this structure in google drive or similar you'll get
       | OCR + keyword searches on the filenames for free, but you can
       | also just sync it to any local filesystem to use "manually", or
       | upgrade to the next latest and greatest cloud storage or
       | whatever.
        
         | dataflow wrote:
         | Kind of similar for me, main difference being that I have a 4th
         | level with the year, like
         | medical/insurance/2022/2022-02-03-insurance-card.pdf. That
         | makes it easier to navigate for me.
        
       | GrifMD wrote:
       | I personally store everything in I cloud following a similar
       | directory structure as tacostakohashi (elsewhere in the thread),
       | though it seems like Google Drive might work for y'all as your
       | split across iOS and Android.
        
       | stormbeard wrote:
       | My photographed documents go on Google Photos and I can just use
       | the image search. I pay for it and don't really care if Google
       | sees it all- I get what I need.
        
       | Andaith wrote:
       | I'm in the process of setting up paperless-ng.
       | 
       | https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng
        
       | Irongirl1 wrote:
       | I have this article by a Czech coder named Vas3k:
       | https://vas3k.com/blog/nocode/
       | 
       | I saved it for another reason, but in it he solves for "X". Maybe
       | it will help you.
        
       | dddw wrote:
       | Mainly a reference folder on a webshare. But was considering
       | paperless-ng lately
        
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       (page generated 2022-02-06 23:01 UTC)