Paperless-ngx vs. DevonThink 3
reddit / selfhosted

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GeekerDad · 2023-10-30 03:10

Hi all -

I've ben using DevonThink 3 on MacOS for a good while now, and am
increasingly getting frustrated with it. I seem to continue to have
orphaned files from crashes overnight if I forget to quit the
software. It HAS done the job just fine for managing my digital
documents even if these crashes are causing me headaches with cleanup
afterward. I use a heirarchical folder structure to organize
everything. I also rename files before they come in to a nice format
like "2023-10-13 Wells Fargo Statement.pdf" using Hazel which gets
about 60-70% of the documents correct in that format and with name
consistency. The rest I have to manually rename. My inputs are a
combination of scans (that I OCR in Abbyy FineReader) and digital
files downloaded or emailed to me. Some of the digital files require
running through OCR again to grab text that's only in the images in
their orginal files. In DT3, about 50% of the files will be auto-
recognized with a correct folder suggestion in the top 1-5
suggestions, which saves time, but of course I'd love to get more
success rate.

I have a Mac desktop and a Windows desktop, a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500
Instant, and a Synology DS1522+ with 43TB active storage.

I've just installed Paperless-ngx with Tika/Gotenberg and have started
uploading files that have previously run through the above process,
but of course I'm losing the folder structure and have to handle with
tags. I'm wondering if anyone has experience with DevonThink 3 and has
advice for me in the switch. I don't see much help from ML yet, but
I'm not sure how long or how much data the training needs. I tried by
uploading one or 2 files from a folder of 50 and did all the tagging
with "learn matching automatically" selected. Then I try uploading a
batch. I've not seen any of them get auto-tagged successfully that
way. I really like the idea of switching to a hosted environment to
decouple from my personal machine. I want to make sure I'm taking full
advantage of what this software has to offer. I've got my hopes up
here! Does anyone have advice on whether I should continue the
ScanSnap -> Mac Abbyy FineReader OCR -> Hazel (for auto-renaming)? Or
is it recommended that non-ocr'd scans into paperless will be the best
way to work with it?

Thanks for reading...

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