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0 pointsnotananthem7y ago0 comments

Can you give a basic writeup of your physical archiving to digital? A friend did this and I want to do this now

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I use https://openpaper.work/en/ - the direct scanning feature doesn't support duplex (yet) so I additionally made a small wrapper script around SANE's 'scanimage' command to scan, which also directly pipes it into Tesseract 4 (OCR). The result is a pdf file with an invisible text layer.

I then import those pdfs into paperwork in bulk. It has a label system and learns to apply labels correctly, which isn't 100% accurate but rather helpful. It also has rather quick fulltext search, which is nice. All in all, paperwork isn't perfect but it does the job well enough for me.

As a scanner, I got an Epson ES-200 (DS-310 in Europe) from Amazon Warehouse Deals (the packaging was dinged, which apparently justified a 35% discount).

I keep around the originals in a big chronological pile, rotated yearly. If I ever need an original document, I can search for it in my digital archive and find out its date. Then I can binary search for it in the pile.

The annoying part is scanning all your old stuff. Even with a fast feed scanner (mine is about as fast as Tesseract can process it in simplex, and twice as fast as the OCR in duplex, making my CPU -- and not the scanner -- the limiting factor), it just takes a lot of time.

kw717y ago

I am doing this too and using ScanSnap. It turns out to be a really good and fast scanner for documents, not really photos. The included manager app works on Windows and Mac, and I have it set up to save bitmap pdf to a network share then run them thru abbyy ocr (also included.) Then I can search from manager's thumbnail browser, the operating system's search facility, or beagle.

plusbryan7y ago

I also use a Fujitsu ScanSnap and have it save to Google Drive automatically. The unit connects directly to WiFi so. I need for a separate device to plug in to.

greenyouse7y ago

There wasn't much to the paper archiving. I bought a fancy scanner[0] and already had a shredder.

To store the files on disk I keep directories marked by topic/year/month/day. The topics are stuff like taxes, finances, bills, etc. The important documents are in a couple encrypted HDDs that I use for backups. I've been thinking of doing an offsite storage like Backblaze B2 but it's probably overkill.

After scanning stuff in, everything gets shredded. There usually aren't many things to save but once they've been scanned they're there forever.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-iX500-Duplex-Scanner...

jacekm7y ago

Offsite backup is not an overkill! Your HDDs can be lost in burglary, water or fire. B2 is cheap, go for it, you may regret not having offsite backup one day. And it does not require much effort, tools like Duplicati can automatically encrypt the data and send it to B2.

stef257y ago

Won't you ever need an original document? Like something with a signature on it.

I'd love to do this as well but I'm sure at some point in the future I'll hear "sorry this won't do, we need the original".

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