Where do you file your stuff?

November 22, 2024 7:55 PM

A mechanic's receipt, my kids report card, a tax form, all as PDFs. Where do you keep them?

I'm on a Mac. I want an easy way to store documents, but I'd like them OCRed and tagged for me so I can find them.

I used to use Evernote for this.

What are good systems to store these kinds of documents? Paperless NGX seems like the closest thing, but I don't have a server and fiddling with docker seems like overkill, as does Devonthink Pro.

posted by cacofonie to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

I'm on a Mac. I have a folder called "Documents". Within this folder are subfolders for things like taxes, work, hobbies, etc. That seems to work well enough.
posted by SPrintF at 8:22 PM on November 22 [4 favorites]

While I'm using Windows, I don't see why my approach wouldn't work on a Mac.
I have a scanned_documents folder, and then subfolders for each year (e.g. scanned_docs-2024), and then subfolders for the month (scanned_docs_2024-11), and then I just toss all of a month's documents into the appropriate subfolder.

So for the visa bill, it would be named chase_visa-2024-11, and stored in the corresponding folder. I can always search for 'visa' and get all the visa bills, or the insurance, or whatever.
posted by coberh at 8:44 PM on November 22 [1 favorite]

I loved Google Stack... it just never got expanded as much as it really needed to so that it could really catch on.

I'm still looking for a good alternative that does the organizing for me.
posted by stormyteal at 9:00 PM on November 22

Old skool here. I do use the computer for keeping notes and the calendar for daily use ..but for paperwork, receipts,bills,insurance info, a will, power of attorney, social security, etc...I have expanding files and manila folders with tabs for identifying the contents
posted by Czjewel at 9:56 PM on November 22 [4 favorites]

KeepIt is one to look at if DevonThink is too complicated.
posted by michaelh at 12:10 AM on November 23

Johnny Decimal, in a folder on my desktop that is synced through icloud and also backblaze. I use YYYYMMDD to datestamp filenames. I scan in everything with my phone when received and once a week or more clear out my download folder to file them which takes a couple of minutes. It's computer-agnostic and has survived the death of one laptop and been really easy to find old documents fast when I'm outside through icloud.

Searching is fast and as long as it's a PDF, I've not had issues searching for text within the document from a file search. The Convert to PDF on phones is OCR-friendly automatically now.

Actual paper documents I have to keep are in a file-folder box. I passed my kids their specific folders when they became adults, so it's a fairly small box now.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 1:29 AM on November 23 [2 favorites]

If you're still unable to find a solution, I do suggest giving Paperless NGX another go. I use an old laptop for a home server that runs TrueNAS SCALE, which makes installing Paperless a few clicks, since it takes care of all the docker nonsense. Feel free to mail me with any questions!
posted by lianove3 at 7:49 AM on November 23

Home NAS backed up to backblaze. Receipts are scanned as jpegs with titles (date, vendor, amount). I have a filing system for projects, areas, resources, and archives. For day-to-day purchases, receipts go into the money area with a subfolder. Other docs go into their respective folder.

If it's a document I will use in another context, it goes into Notion as an embedded PDF or JPG. It's the same filing system (PARA) with some related tables so that I can attach a PDF to an organization, event, task, or other to-do.

I got annoyed with companies like Google or Dropbox holding my data and renting it back to me as storage, so I now have an open-source NAS.
posted by diode at 9:19 AM on November 23

I have considered (but not yet tried) a Mac app called Hazel to help automate the naming and sorting parts of the process of storing all these sorts of documents.
posted by 2 cats in the yard at 5:27 AM on November 24