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I do the same thing, but I just scan with Fujitsu ScanSnap and dump in a huge folder in Dropbox. They're OCR'ed and named with the date by default, and that's e

I do the same thing, but I just scan with Fujitsu ScanSnap and dump in a huge folder in Dropbox. They're OCR'ed and named with the date by default, and that's enough that I can basically always find what I want. That said, I rarely need anything in that folder beyond 10-20 documents like passport or birth certificate scans. To the point where I wonder if the scanning is even worth it. Why don't I just toss all that stuff in a big box (so roughly sorted by time) and go through it in the rare event that I need something someday? I do set aside tax documents when they come, and other "action items", so those are a different case. I'm talking about just the stuff I scan for archival purposes. Seems really unlikely that I actually need that stuff in digital format. For non-paper stuff, I use Evernote. There again though, I have dozens and dozens of notebooks and stacks of notebooks that hold my thousands of notes and it's getting overwhelming. It's getting to the point where I just use my "recent notes", my 10-20 shortcuts for notes I use all the time, and search for everything else.

ilikepi 8y ago
> I rarely need anything in that folder beyond 10-20 documents like passport or birth certificate scans. You trust Dropbox with that sort of thing?
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  Yes. Why shouldn't I? What's the concern exactly?
  - h1d 8y ago
    They could be scanning things around to find patterns of human relationships from face recognition, could have backups that persist forever after you delete or provide data to government or whatever and you won't know. Privacy policy doesn't mean shit unless you can prove it's been broken.
    - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
      I really don’t care about any of that.
obelos 8y ago
“Why don't I just toss all that stuff in a big box (so roughly sorted by time) and go through it in the rare event that I need something someday?” This is basically what I do with nearly all my paper records. It's a sort of JIT filing system. “Writes” into the document store take very little time. I just dump everything into a folder for the current month. I keep a ring buffer of 12 months worth of docs. When a dirty buffer comes up as current, I quickly sort through its contents for the rare item that needs to be preserved for longer than its already year-long storage, file it in a more persistent place, then toss the rest. This comes at the expense of making “reads” from the document store more expensive. But as you point out, fetching docs from this system is relatively rare. It's more than worth the time (and cognitive overhead) to have to occasionally flip through a couple date-delimited folders to fetch a document I need to retrieve.
- farisjarrah 8y ago
  Its like Amazon Glacier for your files.

ilikepi 8y ago

> I rarely need anything in that folder beyond 10-20 documents like passport or birth certificate scans. You trust Dropbox with that sort of thing?

ryanwaggoner 8y ago
Yes. Why shouldn't I? What's the concern exactly?
- h1d 8y ago
  They could be scanning things around to find patterns of human relationships from face recognition, could have backups that persist forever after you delete or provide data to government or whatever and you won't know. Privacy policy doesn't mean shit unless you can prove it's been broken.
  - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
    I really don’t care about any of that.

obelos 8y ago

“Why don't I just toss all that stuff in a big box (so roughly sorted by time) and go through it in the rare event that I need something someday?” This is basically what I do with nearly all my paper records. It's a sort of JIT filing system. “Writes” into the document store take very little time. I just dump everything into a folder for the current month. I keep a ring buffer of 12 months worth of docs. When a dirty buffer comes up as current, I quickly sort through its contents for the rare item that needs to be preserved for longer than its already year-long storage, file it in a more persistent place, then toss the rest. This comes at the expense of making “reads” from the document store more expensive. But as you point out, fetching docs from this system is relatively rare. It's more than worth the time (and cognitive overhead) to have to occasionally flip through a couple date-delimited folders to fetch a document I need to retrieve.

farisjarrah 8y ago
Its like Amazon Glacier for your files.