I got a minimal setup with pihole and nextcloud. I was wondering what else I could do. Share your ideas🙂
Paperless-ngx. It’s a document management system for home users or small companies. Pretty cool if this is something you need. If you spend a lot of time filing away documents, you definitely need this.
is it easy to export its contents to a different app
They have an exporter and a REST API. So yeah.
Just keep in mind it will take a bit of effort to add and categorize your stuff. 😄 I’ve had Paperless installed for two months now but can’t get around to actually moving my stuff into it.
You are so right! That is the painful part that no one talks about! Took me a few days to get paperless-ngx working, because I had wrong firewall and port settings preventing docker containers communicating with each other. Once solved that I was proud and relieved - started scanning and categorizing - but in hindsight that was nothing compared to the amount of work to move stuff to it. I finally accepted that I will just have to keep doing that when I feel like it… which for the past months has been “never”. I now only put new docs in, but the older stuff is still sitting in nas folders.
Once you have some documents indexed, it’ll learn to apply the correct metadata automatically. That works pretty well. You can also apply the data through the REST API, if you have the data available already. But yes, that’s a bit of work. But paperless-ngx makes this easier than any other DMS I’ve ever used.
What are the benefits over just putting documents in a git-annex repository?
Retrieval. Indexing everything thoroughly is a bit of a faff but once you put in the work, finding that one invoice from two years ago becomes very easy. If that’s not a factor for you, git will work too.