Finally going paperless

After years of procrastination, I finally went on with my efforts of going entirely paperless with my company and personal documents. This was a move, that took me over 5 years. But it feels great to have everything handy wherever I am.

Why?

I am a really sorted guy with the stuff I keep on my computers. I backup all of my e-mails and have them at hand searchable. I store most of my digital documents in a dropbox with a well-thought-out directory structure. For physical documents however, the situation is an entirely different one. It often takes me days or weeks to find the right documents.

Let’s get started

The need for such a move was sorely needed. And a week ago I finally found the time to order everything that I need. These are no referral links.

• A cheap and portable scanner with wifi (Brother ADS1700W)
• A raspberry PI to take over scans (Raspberry PI 4 with 8GB)
• An HDD to store the scans for years (Western Digital Red 4TB)
• A SATA-to-USB3 adapter for connecting the hard drive
• A subscription with online backup storage (Hetzner Storage Box)

So I set up the Raspberry Pi with Ubuntu server (Download the image here) by flashing it with Balena Etcher. After this step, I obtained the IP address from my home router, logged in for the first time, set the IP to a static one outside my DHCP range, and uploaded my public key with ssh-copy-id.

Then I installed docker by issuing this command:

apt install docker.io

Then I followed these instructions to allow my non-root user to use docker.

I also installed docker-compose from the Github release page here.

Now I only had to put up my docker-compose file:

version: "2.1"
services:
  paperless-ng-broker:
    image: redis:6.0
    restart: unless-stopped
  paperless-ng:
    image: jonaswinkler/paperless-ng:1.5.0
    container_name: paperless-ng
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Europe/Berlin
      - PAPERLESS_REDIS=redis://paperless-ng-broker:6379
      - PAPERLESS_ADMIN_USER=admin
      - PAPERLESS_ADMIN_PASSWORD=<redacted>
    volumes:
      - /data/paperless/data:/usr/src/paperless/data
      - /data/paperless/media:/usr/src/paperless/media
      - /data/paperless/consume:/usr/src/paperless/consume
      - /data/paperless/export:/usr/src/paperless/export
    ports:
      - 8000:8000
    restart: unless-stopped

Et voilà. Paperless NG is running in all it’s glory. Now I installed vsftpd on the host system. I did not bother with a docker container for thisas I had memories of really strange images and a messy configuration with all things FTP inside of docker.

apt install vsftpd

After installation I edited the configuration file /etc/vsftpd.conf. I allowed writing and chrooted the FTP server to the home directory. Then it was time for the first test. I configured the scanner to upload to the paperless consume folder. After two or three tries it actually worked.

I put the scanner right next to the main door. Whenever a new letter arrives, it gets opened, scanned and then I put it into one of these archive boxes. Paperless automatically tags the current box and drawer number onto newly scanned documents.

This way I know exactly in which box I have to look for a specific document.