Comment on New to self-hosting

• dan@upvote.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  ScanSnap iX1600. I bought mine from B&H: bhphotovideo.com/…/fujitsu_pa03770_b635_scansnap_…. It’s the one that usually gets recommended for paperless.

  It’s a really compact unit - smaller than I thought it’d be! You can put up to 50 sheets in the feeder and it scans them all, on both sides (no need to manually flip the pages). Can scan 40 pages per minute.

  There’s just a few minor issues with it, but otherwise it’s perfect:

  • It was a bit expensive, at $400 in the USA.
  • You need a Windows or MacOS system to do the initial setup. Setting it up is done through a desktop app rather than through the touchscreen on the device.
  • It doesn’t support scanning to “the cloud” (Google Drive, etc) without signing up to their cloud service. However, it does support scanning to a SMB share, which is all I needed. I have my paperless-ngx “consume” directory shared via Samba. The default scanning profiles require it to be plugged into a computer running their software, but you can delete all of them and just have a network scan (SMB) one, which works with no computer attached.

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  • Obelix@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    For everybody, who hasn’t that much of paperwork: I’m kind of doing the same, but without barcode stickers. Just scan the document into paperless and then stick it in a box or a folder. If you need the physical document sometimes in the future (which you won’t), paperless of course has the date of the scan / date of the document available. It then it quite easy to take your chronolocical sorted documents and find the one that came in on 2023-04-14

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  • BennyInc@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Interesting approach with the ASN — haven’t started using that feature yet. If I understand correctly, you add a QR ASN to each document you need to keep a physical copy of? And that sticker also has the ASN in human readable form? So you would then add many documents at once to the feeder, and Paperless will read the QR and also split documents whenever a new code appears?

    What about documents you don’t want to keep physically? Is there a way to get Paperless to split them automatically as well if you add many to the feeder?

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    • dan@upvote.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      And that sticker also has the ASN in human readable form?

      Yes! They look like this: Image

      So you would then add many documents at once to the feeder, and Paperless will read the QR and also split documents whenever a new code appears? What about documents you don’t want to keep physically? Is there a way to get Paperless to split them automatically as well if you add many to the feeder?

      Paperless supports two different splitting methods:

      • If it encounters an ASN QR code, it’ll split at that point and keep the page with the barcode
      • If it encounters a special barcode that’s used as a separator sheet, it’ll split at that point and delete the page with the barcode. By default it looks for a “Patch T” barcode, and you can a page with a Patch T barcode from www.alliancegroup.co.uk/patch-codes.htm

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      • BennyInc@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Thanks, this sounds really useful. Patch T sounds like some manual sorting work, but I guess with the option to reuse those separator pages it is still better than manual splitting or - worse - single scanning.

        I haven’t looked into paperless-ai yet, but I hope my machine would be beefy enough for this task — worst case I guess it might take a little longer to process all docs.

        Now I only still need to decide on a good archiving method. I read some article a long time ago about the pros and cons of different document archiving methods used by professional archivers. Some prefer horizontal stacking in boxes, while others prefer vertical stacks in vertical boxes. Pretty interesting nerdy topic 😀

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