Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I haven't really configured a tagging system that makes any sense so it's mostly used the search through documents through text. I'd like to figure out how to hook up a vector database to it to do really fuzzy searching
I currently have a love hate relationship with it, but that’s mostly because of issues outside of paperless. I had been uploading to my server automatically with Nextcloud, and processing the files with paperless as they came in. Next thing I know, all the files are gone and none of the documents are available in paperless any longer, just the OCR translations that… leave something to be desired sometimes.
I’ve scrapped the whole thing in the short term, and will likely try again in the long term. Just need to find the time.
Sounds like maybe you ran it as a container and didn't mount the document archive externally then updated the container. That would have likely blown away the actual ingested documents but left the Metadata (including the OCR data) where it was, assuming the database was either its own container or mounted externally
Nah, the container had an external volume for storage. That’s one of the first things I checked.
Where did the docs go?
I believe the server purged them for space? Not really sure tbh.
I encountered such problem the moment when watchtower pulled the latest update, including postgres:16. After setting the docker compose file back to postgres:15.4 and updating the stack, all data reappeared.
This could have been it. At this point the data is fully lost though, as I killed the container completely.
Paperless was my docker training program. I did so many mistakes and end up losing my database 3 times. My fourth try, runs smooth and I backup everything regularly. Actually 1.300 documents.
After indexing everything, I learned loving the archive feature. Docs I scanned, and don't want to trash in real got a number in paperless and the same number in the paper folder.
Works great. Setup a month ago and imported over 600 documents, both digital and scanned. Makes backup a lot easier too as everything is in one place now.
Does it do OCR? And can you create tags / naming convention / folders based on rules and text within the scanned document? I want to digitize all my paperwork, but there is so much I don't have time to do the organizing part of it manually.
Ha! I wrote it! Well the original anyway. It's been forked a few times since I stepped away.
So yeah, I think it's pretty cool 😆
Just want to say thank you! Paperless is one of the first things I recommend to anyone considering self hosting their infra. Amazing piece of work!
Thanks! The crazy thing is that it's really not that complicated. I'd say the hardest work was in writing the docs :-). It's awesome to hear that people still use it and love it though.
Legend!
Do you use NGX yourself?
Actually, I stepped away from the project 'cause I stopped using it altogether. I started the project to satisfy the British government with their ridiculous requirements for proof of my relationship with my wife so I could live here. Once I was settled though and didn't need to be able to bring up flight itineraries from 5 years ago, it stopped being something I needed.
Well that, and lemme tell you, maintaining a popular Free software project is HARD. Everyone has an idea of where stuff should go, but most of the contributions come in piecemeal, so you're left mostly acting as the one trying to wrangle different styles and architectures into something cohesive... while you're also holding down a day job. It was stressful to say the least, and with a kid on the way, something had to give.
But every once in a while I consider installing paperless-ngx just to see how it's come along, and how much has changed. I'm absolutely delighted that it's been running and growing in my absence, and from the screenshots alone, I see that a lot of the ideas people had when I was helming made it in in the end.
Thank you very much for the generously contributed code and time while working on it.The effort you put in, will live on for many years to come.
Aww! Thank you! It was fun ❤️
Hey man, that is what I used it for, but with the Belgian government! Great piece of software though!
It is honestly an awesone tool.
Oh wow! Quite a journey!
I'd consider Paperless a hall-of-famer for self-hosted software and something most people who get into self-hosting discover at some point, even if they don't use it.
So thanks for building it, even if you've moved on. You gave the forkers something great to build from.
I've used it for a few months now and find it quite useful for storing and organizing my physical documents.
What scanners do people recommend?
If you have an Android phone I can't recommend Genius Scan enough. Fast, accurate, lots of features. I use it with syncthing by exporting the files to a folder that's configured to sync the paperless input folder.
Brother ADS-1700W is amazing!
- no PC or USB required: place it anywhere
- WiFi
- scans a page double-sided to PDF in two seconds!
- sends file to network share, ready to be consumed by Paperless
- fully automatic, no button presses needed!
- tiny footprint
- document feeder
- use with separator pages to bulk-scan many documents in one go
😍
275€
Photos with my phone it is! Most documents I receive nowadays are digital anyway.
I'm in the same boat, but didn't jump so yet. I've been following paperless for a while now but every time I look at scanners I'm blown away by their prices...
You are right, it's not cheap. I delayed buying one for literally years but once I did, it was a game changer.
I have this scanner and agree it works great, although there may be cheaper options out there that also work well.
FTP worked well out of the box. For SFTP on Arch Linux, I had to follow the troubleshooting instructions here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Very_Secure_FTP_Daemon#LIST_command_resets_connection.
Slow and unreliable with sqlite, but rock solid and amazing with postgres.
Today, every document I receive goes into my duplex ADF scanner to scan to a network share which is monitored by Paperless. Documents there are ingested and pre-tagged, waiting for me to review them in the inbox. Unlike other posters here, I find the tagging process extremely fast and easy. Granted, I didn't have to bring in thousands of documents to begin with but started from a clean slate.
What's more, development is incredibly fast-moving and really useful features are added all the time.
Slow and unreliable with sqlite, but rock solid and amazing with postgres.
I haven't noticed any major performance issues with sqlite. What tasks improved for you when you moved to postgres?
Page loading times, general stability. Everything, really.
I set it up with sqlite initially to test if it was for me, and was surprised how flaky it felt given how highly people spoke about it. I'm really glad I tried with postgres instead of just tearing it down. But my experience is highly anecdotal, of course.
My family and I really like it. I invested in a small, physical scanner capable of network file sharing that we have plugged in and always ready to scan. When we get documents or receipts, we scan them and they're immediately added to the database. I also have it checking an email address (mine is custom, but you could really have it check any address) and any time a PDF or such is sent, it gets consumed and that email them gets sorted.
There are a few downsides, however. As mentioned in other posts, turning your physical stack of documents into a digital stack of documents is just trading one pile for another. At least with a digital pile, you can sort a little quicker, but you still have to sort the consumed documents and check them to make sure the engine, which is supposed to be learning, has elected to sort the documents correctly.
The compose stack is pretty easy to use, but it does benefit from a little knowledge in Docker/containers. Especially when the main container decides it's not healthy. I wouldn't recommend it to a first time Docker user, is all.
Additionally and also previously mentioned, if you're keeping important documents in it, encrypted storage with encrypted back up is important.