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I scan everything pretty aggressively, since I hate physical papers of any kind lying around. Documents that are scanned within the last ~month sit unencrypted
by dmitrybrant 5y ago
I scan everything pretty aggressively, since I hate physical papers of any kind lying around. Documents that are scanned within the last ~month sit unencrypted on a NAS, and organized in the style of "/2021/Taxes", "/2021/Bills", etc.
Periodically I take the current batch of unencrypted files and add them to a VeraCrypt volume, which contains files organized in this way, going back to around 2005. The encrypted volume sits on the same NAS. There have been surprisingly few times that I've had to "search" for an old document in the archives. And when I do, I can just go to the target year folder, and glance through the scanned images, and also make sure to give descriptive names to the scanned files, if it's important.
Once every few months I back up the encrypted volume to a gold-layered DVD disc (The encrypted volume is still nowhere near 4.7 GB), and store it in a cool, dark place.
- criddell 5y agoHow well does your scanner do in recognizing text? Is your archive searchable? I've been stuffing things into Evernote for around a decade now but there recent changes to the Windows client means I'm probably done with that service. One thing that I love is how they find text in just about anything you upload and so the document can be found via search.
- jbellis 5y agoI'm also underwhelmed with the new Evernote clients. (IMO it's gotten worse on Android, too.) But I like Onenote even less. What are you looking at moving to?
- criddell 5y agoI haven't found anything I like yet. Everything seems to be either web based or Electron. There are some interesting macOS programs out there (DevonThink for one) but I'm not sure I want to buy a Mac just for that.
- unexpected 5y agoI have a scansnap and it's pretty much changed my life. The OCR is pretty good, and easy enough to do that my wife or kids can do it. Anything scanned automatically gets OCR'ed and placed in a family dropbox folder. Everything is OCR'ed so I can search for it if I need something, and since everything is one folder, the next time I'm on a plane or at an airport or whatever, I just turn on a movie and spend time categorizing the files in the folder.