I’m looking for a service I could install to archive a huge pile of letters, preferably in PDF form, to a database. I’m living in a country where paper is still king, and digital services are either non-existent, or loathed (Germany). My current situation is that I have a mailbox with lots of PDFs all over the place, but also many folders of paper sent in 2007 etc. that I have to keep, but I also have to find them every five years or so.

So what I’d like to have is a service to my homelab, where I could scan these and copy these, that would index them, clean them, OCR them and all that good stuff. It should have really good metadata abilities, because my files are usually named in a very random way, so if I could copy these, and quickly categorize them, that would be really awesome.

There is one service called Papermerge, that kind of fits to my use-case. I spent one afternoon with it, and there were a few issues:

  • crashes quite often
  • when sending a large folder of PDFs, uses all the CPU and crashes again
  • categorizing functions are not very good, it takes time to get everything together and clean when organizing files

This might not be very interesting if your country has digital services for everything, but for us needing to suffer this paper madness, a service to do so would be great.

  • rentar42
    1•1 year ago

    Note that just because everything is digital doesn’t mean something like that isn’t necessary: If you depend on your service provider to keep all of your records then you will be out of luck once they … stop liking you, go out of business, have a technical malfunction, decide they no longer want to keep any records older than X years, …

    So even in a all-digital world I’d still keep all the PDF artifacts in something like that.

    And I also second the suggestion of paperless-ngx (even though I’m not using it for very long yet, but it’s working great so far).

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Of course. My setup now is a Proxmox server + a NAS. What I’m planning to do is to install a service for this to Proxmox, then have the files synced over NFS to the NAS, which then backs them up every night to Backblaze. And of course I need to have the paper copies too, but to be able to search, tag and archive the documents is great when you need to remember a thing X that was mentioned in a paper I got back in 2014.