What can the 'average Joe' start hosting, that will change their life?

jaackf@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 995 points –

I'm already hosting pihole, but i know there's so much great stuff out there! I want to find some useful things that I can get my hands on. Thanks!

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As far as changed your life, there are not too many that i really love, that made a massive difference to how i do things. But there is one:

Paperless_ngx

ALL of my paper work, receipts, transcripts, tax, shares, council rates. Everything goes in there. We no longer have paper lieing everywhere (well, my wife is another matter, still keeps grocery shopping reciepts...). when i get soimething in the mail, i used the paperless app to "scan" it, upload it, then bin the paper.

An actual life change that i didn't know i needed.

Is it possible for the scans to be stored as files that are readable should paperless crash and I’m not around to get it up and running, or are files stored as weird non-standard file formats?

The files are stored in a directory and you can define the default path with an environment variable ( file-name-handling ). If you need a more fine graint solution you can also use storage paths and select it on file level ( storage-paths ). I'm using syncthing to sync the folder structure to my other devices.

And if you try paperless and don’t like it, docspell is another great option.

Commenting here to save this and also to create engagement.

did you know that you can save a post, by clicking the star?

also, appreciate the engagement :D

I also am creating engagement.

i thoguht you may be a bot as there are 20-odd replies the same, but my guess is you are using an app which is a bit dicky.

can you delete all the repeats?

Tried, app wasn't letting me delete either... Funny that it was on this specific post.

How is your work flow from scanning to paperless? Does it support some kind of upload folder?

Yeah paperless supports an upload folder. My scanner has an ability to scan to a network drive, so I scan things onto a shared drive on my homelab box, paperless consumes the scanned PDF and places it into the paperless "inbox".

i dont have a scanner, but do use the email function to get my work payslips.

Cool, that's really easy. I'll have to bring that up with my gf. She's basically hoarding printouts and stuff (she's a teacher) and this might help her in getting it a bit more organized

Yep, supports upload folder, normal upload in the application and also automatically importing from email based on folder/label

That looks really cool. At the moment I scan everything with OneDrive, and sync it with my NAS. However, it doesn't have e.g. OCR features, it's pretty basic. Will have a look, thanks!

definitely try it out. You can auto-ingest from the scanner folder and it will do all the rest of the sorting for you. I go in every few weeks/months and look at the recent documents to sort and fix up any meta-data/sorting.

Thanks. I've set it up and imported all my existing scans. Works great.

awesome. i think that the initial install "just works", then you can start to tweak it. just make sure you mount actual directories, not docker volumes, otherwise you cannto see the files on the disk.

Thanks for the suggestion! I tried to do that and have the files reside on a mount (on my NAS) but that didn't work, resulted in a "chmod" error. So, instead I've created a shell script that runs every night and creates a backup & copies the resulting zip file to my NAS :)

By the way, when using docker volumes, you can see the actual files as well. In my case (RPI4) they are located here: /var/lib/docker/volumes/paperless_media/_data/documents

good to know! thanks

With the right permissions you can get to them. ( i needed root, well started with root)

Why is this better for you than using a folder structure with a decent naming convention? I've tried to get started a couple times, but I just haven't managed to get what's better about it. I know i'm missing something, and I feel like if I knew what it is i'd be more likely to out in the work to transition.

well, there are a few things:

  1. using the app to take photos (in a scan sort of mode, where it trims it to be at right angles), really quick and easy, no matter where i am.
  2. remote access - i can view all of my documents where ever i am.
  3. easy & sophisticated search. I have my documents assigned to people (me, wife, child, etc). I also assigned them to things like payslips, tax, shares, legal documents, education docs, receipts, etc. it also helps to automatically tag them to some degree of accuracy
  4. Automatic dating, it is quite good at picking out the date of the document, as seperate to the upload date. and it is easily updatable if it is wrong
  5. OCR - the documents content is searchable!
  6. Ease of tax time. I have some financial year views that make it really easy for me to do my tax (Australia), and i dont need to go hunting for paper that has faded in the heat and is no longer legible.
  7. folders - the documents are placed in a folder structure of your choosing. if you change the details in the document meta-data, it will move it to the correct place.

so, whilst a folder structure would work. this is SOOO much easier, and provides much more functionality as it is not just storage. it also has WAF!

That was a really clear explanation, thanks. Decent remote scanning would be nice. I guess I just have to wrap my head around tags for some of the niceties to make sense, though I guess i'd be no worse off if I just used folders if that's an option as well.

you're welcome.

I tend to use document types more than tags now. note that there are a number of meta-data fields:

  • correspondent
  • docuemnt type
  • tag

i started with tag, but now mostly use a combination of the doc date, type and correspondent. Then use the search bar for specific documents.

Yo this shit is awesome. Going to be setting this up asap.

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