https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37800951 (183 comments)

I tested it out then and am considering migrating from my current system (Google Drive) to using a self-hosted approach. Paperless seems to have a good approach for minimizing the mental overhead of ingesting and categorizing new documents - which is what ultimately leads me to stacking documents up for months before processing them. My initial pilot run was promising, but I haven't gotten around to switching yet.

From the changelog, it's not really clear to me what's notable about this release, especially as a new/potential user.

This page is a better introduction to the product, although it doesn't mention the v2 release yet:

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

I just updated my install to v2.0.0 with a simple podman pull and a systemctl restart of my paperless pod and everything looks great. Hats off to the contributors of the project. Every update, even major ones like this have been really smooth.

1: https://github.com/jdoss/ppngx

Last I checked it doesn't and had to run a separate service to advertise to the printer the paperless endpoint.

Does anyone have a good scanner recommendation though? I am eyeing the Brother ADS-1700W since it seems to be recommended often, but I would really like to use the "scan to webhook" feature (it's 2023 after all) instead of SMTP or whatever else are the options I would have with the Brother.

I installed Paperless on my home server & spent a night digitizing everything. After being comfortable with it for a few months I went back & shredded all my paper copies. Today my process is similar - when I get a document I would normally toss in that filing cabinet I just scan, upload to Paperless, and shred it. It's also really nice for storing large purchase receipts - I've previously had the writing on thermal paper receipts go invisible after a period of time, no longer an issue.

Searching for something specific is so easy now! Huge QOL improvement. Just make sure you have a solid backup strategy, losing my Paperless database & filestore would be devastating.

To me it means Angular (the web framework). So, I was surprised to learn this wasn't an Angular plugin. Angular is often referred to as ng for short and as such their plugins tend to have ngx as a prefix. For example, the angular wrapper for ChartJS is ngx-chartjs.

For me, as someone who wants my docs on my own server, but well, doesn't care enough to want to constantly keep up with forks/changes/migration/updates, I've been looking for just something stable I can use for years (or maybe decades?, eg part of the appeal of something like Obisidian is that it just falls back to .md text files).

Curious if there are any long-term active users of this (or other systems) for handling all their paper and what they think about maintainability/longevity?

Their entrypoint script makes a lot of assumptions and in their docker-compose example they use a single container running supervisord instead of multiple containers, each with a dedicated purpose (ingestion, consuming, web server). The setup is almost insistent on logging to a file instead of stdout. It also checks and tries to modify permissions of some folders(!!). This requires quite a bit of unpicking.

This is doable, but not frictionless to get it to do what I consider “best practices” but I understand that it’s probably a mix of “easy for someone who’s day job is not to be an infrastructure engineer” and “we were using supervisord for baremetal anyway”. Maybe a lot of it is personal preference but I do feel like the project is not taking containerisation fully to heart. Maybe being more user-friendly in their eyes is more important than being a containerisation purist.

Either way, I’ve got it nearly working with my Brother ADS-1700W, which has shortcuts for me, my wife, and “joint”, which uploads documents to different directories via SFTP which then automatically have their paperless-ngx owner set appropriately.

I have zero regrets so far. Paperless ngx is so much more user friendly, the automatic date extraction from OCR, the auto tagging and document type classification, and the ease to backup and restore sold me. I highly recommend it.

I am using iPhone as a scanner and it automatically scans, OCRs, uploads and ingests to the paperless-ngx instance, even remotely using tailscale.

The iPhone camera is more than good enough for scanning documents.

I'll clean all the rollers and stuff next week and test it :P

In that case I scanned to a USB drive attached to the scanner (since each photo was a separate file). For Paperless I use the Epson Smart app, scan the document with whatever settings, remove/rotate pages as needed, and then share it to Paperless with Paperless Share [0].

Many network attached scanners can scan to SMB, no device needed, but I kind of like the human-in-the-loop aspect. Since my Paperless server runs on an HDD next to the scanner I can actually hear once the file lands which is quite satisfying.

[0] https://github.com/qcasey/paperless_share