I used paperless for a while but ended up just saving pdfs to directories instead. I can find what I need without fancy OCR features by organizing and naming files sensibly. And I am fairly certain this will still work in 40 years, while paperless, or even Linux, might no longer exist.

That was sort of the approach I had been planning on going for (manual scanning and putting it in directories that get cloud backed up). I have a pretty good scanner app on my phone, and so just scanning after opening the mail for some important document or invoice, uploading to the document storage, and then shredding seemed to be pretty low fanfare.

Which scanner app are you using?

In the end, paperless also stores the original pdfs in a directory. You get some more goodies from it, like automatic OCR and a web interface, but your baselines is also included.

Why not do both? Use rsync to do a one way sync by keeping a filter list to the paperless consume directory so whenever you drop any new documents to your original folder structures, it copies THAT to the consume and paperless consumes it?

I can recommend paperless. I am running it locally in a Docker container and sync database/files with iCloud (so they are backed up). I've been thinking about putting them on the actual web to access them anywhere, but so far having paperless "just" on my computer was enough.

There are alternatives. I chose paperless because was the most mature opensource solution.

Be aware that there is paperless, paperless-ng and paperless-ngx.

When I did the setup last year paperless-ngx look like the most maintained.

> When I did the setup last year paperless-ngx look like the most maintained.

Just FYI, none of those were hostile forks, but in both the community taking over after the former maintainers abandoned the project. NGX is indeed the active version.

That's clearer. Thanks