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?