I think everybody on here is constantly keeping an eye out for what to host next. Sometimes you spinup something which chugs along nicely but sometimes you find out you’ve been missing out.
For me it’s not very refreshing or new: Paperless-ngx. Never thought I would add all my administration to it. But it’s great. I probably can’t find the thing I need, but I should have a record of every mail or letter I’ve gotten. Close second is Wanderer. But I would like to have a little bit more features like adding recorded routes to view speed and compare with previous walks. But that’s not what it is intended for.
What is that service for you?
Paperless - Pay slips, Bank statements, MOT records, Insurance policies, User manuals, restaurant menus. All filed and searchable. Letters I get are photographed, uploaded and immediately disposed of, zero stress.
Something a lot of people miss with paperless is its automatic import options.
There is a folder called ‘consume’ that you can place files in and paperless will import them just like you’d uploaded them manually. Combined with tools like FolderSync or SyncThing you can have files on all sorts of devices automatically upload to paperless.
Sitting down to use the flatbed scanner is a hassle, so I use GoogleLens to take multiple photos of a document, save them as a single pdf, then FolderSync moves that to my server automatically where paperless imports it.
Along side this; Paperless has an smtp mail importer. You can add your email accounts and paperless will automatically import new emails based on whatever criteria you specify. Imported mail will then be flagged, moved, or outright deleted from the mail server.
You’re right, I don’t take advantage of any of these features. I should.
Partly because of lack of know how on my part. So I don’t trust myself to successfully have it log into my email, get what it needs and leave everything else untouched. My main uploads, payslips and bank statements, are behind their own apps too.
Partly because paperless is isolated in it’s own little container (in my setup at least) so access to the consume folder is behind another step, I could syncthing it… I just haven’t.
And partly because I use the android app as my main interaction with Paperless. The app uses my phone as a good-enough scanner.
For this, Bind-mounts are your friend:
Files get dropped in /srv/paperless-ngx/consume on the host and import to the container.
As far as setting up mail goes: it’s pretty straightforward. Add an account, then create a rule for each type of mail you want it to manage. Specify filters like who it’s from, what’s in the subject/body, how old is it, etc.
And until you are comfortable, just leave the action set to mark as read. Worst case, if you didn’t set your filters right; it’ll unnecessarily mark mail as read. No big deal.
I just have mine move processed mail to a folder on the mail server called ‘Paperless-Imported’, which I manually clean out now and again.
Thank you. Setting it up seems less daunting now. I’m going to try for setting up emails.
The android app is fairly functionally complete, and I only interact with my phone or tablet. In fact, for desktop tasks I have a Linux Mint VM I just console into from my tablet, a sort of sudo laptop.
In anycase, for manual uploading files my phone is probably easier. But, your advice is good for everybody that’s not me, sensible people.
Your comment about bindmounts might have solved my biggest problem with Paperless, in that it doesn’t write to my 3-2-1 back up folder directly so I end up 3-2-1ing the whole machine. Which is fine, but I keep multiple snap shots of my LXCs so it’s multiples of multiples.
/zpool/important/paperless:/use/src/paperless/originalSpecific file paths aside, would [path to zpool]:[path to originals] have paperless saving the originals to my zpool so I would only have 3 copies instead of 3*#of snapshots?
Indeed it would. That’s exactly how I have mine setup; with borg backing up the originals folder from the host.
If you are making this change to an existing installation; remember to copy the contents of the current originals folder out of the container and into the host folder you intended to bind mount, before you change the mount.
So, copy the contents of container:‘/use/src/paperless/original’ place them in host:‘/use/src/paperless/original’, THEN add your bind mount to the container config.
Otherwise you may lose the contents of the folder within the container and have to retrieve it from a backup.
My server is full of bindmounts. Too many bind mounts. It causes a host of permissions issues if I’m honest. There wasn’t a storage problem I didn’t solve with bindmounts. Except this one, this one I decided I had to have interact over SMB or some shit.
I remember, I tried to solve it with bind mounts before. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t saving to /mnt/important/paperless/… I think when I get to /originals it’s going to look like ./originals/mnt/important/paperless/… Somewhere it’s going to look like that. Urgh
Thank you. With that problem solved Paperless is, currently, perfect for my needs.
We taught each other something new: I didn’t know there was a mobile app. Imma go check that out :)
Is the document exporter the only backup system? I’d want to connect it to a cloud backup somehow if I’m going to trust it with all my important stuff.
It stores the documents in the form they were imported in a folder called ‘/originals/’, with the contents sorted according to the rules you set in paperless. You can back that up however you’d like.
So paperless works as a service that ties into your storage. I point mine at an NFS share on my Synology and just backup that share. The documents are all stored as PDFs still so worst case I still have “dumb” copies without all the tagging available if my paperless instance goes offline for some reason.
Couldn’t tell you, sorry. I have Paperless in it’s own LXC (helper-script) which I 3-2-1 as a machine. Many duplicates, but they’re only PDFs.
I can tell you I spent a small amount of time trying (and failing) to get paperless to save the files onto my NAS. I can also tell you, if I stretched up really tall I can just about scrape rock bottom when it comes to skills in this stuff.
Could you elaborate a little on the LXC, please?
I was thinking about looking into Paperless after seeing it gleefully mentioned so much in this post, but lack of easy/accessible backups seems strange for something you wanna use to eventually destroy your only other copy of it (the physical letter).
Sure,
I used TTecks helper script to install paperless as an LXC. I then use proxmox’s inbuilt back up schedule to grab snapshots of that LXC, and others, I usually keep 1 "nightly"and 1 “monthly” right now.
Syncthing, another LXC thank you tteck, has access to the back up folder. It is synced with a RPi 4 pulling double duty as my redundant DNS all installed using Docker. The pi 4 install is synced with my proxmox host and an off-site box, through tailscale at my parent’s house.
There are better systems, like Borg and what not, but this one is mine.
I have an “important” share on a my NAS that is also synced 3-2-1. It would be better if Paperless saved to my NAS directly, then I’d only have 3 copies. Right now I have 6: 1 nightly and 1 monthly spread across 3 machines, not counting RAID because the “b” in “RAID” stands for back up.
My oh shit plan: grab a back up file. Rebuild the lxc from that snapshot. Access my pdfs.
I keep once in a lifetime stuff: birth certificate, paper counter part to my driver’s license, etc. They’re still backed up. But, for day-day communications that I’m supposed to keep: 5 years financials, tennant agreements etc. My old filing system was “throw them in a box, if I remembered and find them never. Or, try not delete the email they’re attached to”. Now I have a glimmer of a hope
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Is there a way to share groups of files at once? For example I currently share tax files with my accountant using seafile so right now I scan everything and just drop it into a folder. I would love to use paperless but being able to share folder that can be downloaded all at once is a critical workflow for me.
You can configure storage paths. That way, you can direct tags to be stored in a specific folder.
You can then get the files for the accountant from your file system.
The way you would do this with paperless is to create a user in paperless for your accountant to login to.
You would then grant that user permission to view/edit either: a tag, a storage path, a document type, a correspondent, or just individual documents. (or any/all of the above).
When it comes to providing external share links that anyone can use; you can only share single files at a time in paperless. If that’s what you’re looking for, I’d recommend FileBrowser. You can create a permanent share link that allows anyone that views it to view the contents of a folder and download each file or the whole collection as a .zip. You can even add a password required to view the page if you like.
I do not know. I don’t believe you can provide a share link for a whole tag, just individual documents. I’m not seeing an obvious way of exporting a tag either.
You could run paperless in parallel and syncthing your files into its “consume” folder.