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Ask HN: How do you organize/store your personal information and documents?
Doing some research from an Executive Assistant's perspective on how other people keep their information organized.
Link or comment > https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZPS5XXX
- nikivi 6y agoI keep things in markdown files. Private files go in folder that's git ignored. https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge
- brittpart_ 6y agoCool, I have no idea what GitHub it except you can keep code in there
- sloaken 6y agoDo you keep personal items there too? Like copy of birth certificate or passport? Or are those in your gitignore areas?
- nikivi 6y agoThose are in 1password.
- mraza007 6y agoI use github markdown or vimwiki sometimes.
- slovette 6y agoI think this is one of those easily over-thought of things. I keep a digital file system the same as my parents used to keep their filing cabinet. Alphabetized folders. Each person in the family (me, wife & kids) has their own folder with all their stuff in it. I have every important document scanned and saved as PDFs. The physical originals live in a real file folder of the same name and organized structure inside the filing cabinet in the closet. Product receipts for warranties and docs, insurance declarations, taxes, credit card agreements and scanned card copies, etc all organized as you’d typically see in a real filing cabinet with their digital PDF counterparts inside a digital folder. This is all stored using iCloud Drive (we’re an Apple family) that’s accessible from all my devices. It’s actually been a life saver several times while on travel. Wife lost her passport once coming back from Mexico, being able to pull up a PDF scan kept us from being trapped outside the country. Some things we really don’t need a SAAS product for. Just create folders and take care to keep them up to date and organized as you would an old school filing cabinet.
- dhruvkar 6y agoDo you find value in keeping the hard copy? I've been scanning all documents for 6 years now, and over that time, I have 4 buckets: A. scan and file B. scan and throw C. scan and shred D. just throw Scanner OCRs the docs and drops them into Dropbox (unlimited business plan). I found that A is a very very tiny minority (1-5%) of all documents.
- slovette 6y agoSo, 2 things: 1. I like OCR, but I don’t like relying on it for search in a vast pool of important documents. Filing in labeled folders means I’m not relying on some obscure algorithm or the accuracy of an OCR tech to make my digital files practical/accessible. This proved the correct way to think when I moved files from Dropbox, to GDrive and then ultimately iCloud. One service would find what I wanted, the next would not or find some file based on an unexpected match. All that meant I had to spend a significant time digging around. With folders, I have manual organization as a base and can still use search and OCR as a convenience. 2. I find value in the physical files only as a basic backup to a digital outage. Computer fails, phone is left somewhere, internet goes out, etc. it’s not all happened at once yet, but there has been several occasions where just going into the closet and grabbing the hard file was easiest.
- notadog 6y agoI don't personally use it, but many of my coworkers and friends use Evernote for keeping their information organized.
- itsmeamario 6y agoI use a markdown blog with Github Pages. This way I have my notes online and can access them every time I need them.
- vira28 6y agoUsing Typora pretty much.