To be honest, I don’t really have a use-case for it, because I don’t really need any of the sharing and collaboration features which are kind of the main point imo. The only compelling reason is that I read somewhere that it is a good option to backup mobile devices. I know that Nextcloud is a real beast of a software and there are probably some more lightweight options out there for that purpose.

I never heard about any of those two, but it looks like file browser is going to be archived in September if that is the one you mean.

That is one of the reasons why I want to switch to version control for more important documents. To have a proper file history, depending on the file type look at a diff to check if something was an accidental edit or an uncommitted change and also that I can work locally and have the NAS only as a mirror and backup.

Sounds like a good strategy.

What do you mean by “change”? Never noticed anything.

I just found out that with Tika and Gotenberg you can also supply office type documents to Paperless. So I figured there are people using this for files that might change in the future because you e.g. added another paragraph to a text document. You essentially have the same file twice but in different versions. But I guess that is not really the use-case. It is more for “official” documents that don’t change anymore.

Yeah, that keeping things separate approach seems to be a good idea. It is just that idea that I can interact with my data from within various different tools, has some kind of appeal to me.

Good point. My documents share on the NAS just isn’t organized in a way that it only contains documents that are in a final state like PDFs of your electricity bills or something. It might also contain a spreadsheet comparing different options of a thing I want to buy. I don’t want to loose that file hence its on the NAS, but I also don’t need to keep track of it in Paperless especially not if it isn’t finished and can change next week. I also don’t need to have the overhead of a version control system because its not that important either.

If it’s updatable personally I have everything version controlled - and I mean EVERYTHING, from CV over tutorials to construction ideas - hosted locally on forgejo.

That is actually what I am planning to setup as well. I think I could live with an approach like:

• Everything that doesn’t change is shoved into Paperless and managed in there
• Important documents that can change are handled by a version control system
• There is one share on the NAS that handles all types of other documents that should be preserved but don’t fall into the other categories. As a bonus, I could even checkout the version controlled files there so that I have a single place for all my non-Paperless documents.

Since I mostly only use 1 app to manage each “type” of data, I let them have their own folder. Unmanaged files just go on a personal share

By pretty much just accessing the files trough that application. The only way I need to access them in another way is if I need to migrate to another app

That is in my opinion also how these tools are supposed to be used. So this seem like a reasonable approach. It just means that you have to give away some form of power/flexibility in order for the tool to do its job properly. Which is still the point I am struggling with a bit.

I don’t use Nextcloud, but when accessing files, doesn’t it just show the normal folder structure? You can give it access to the “base” folder and see everything if needed.

To be honest, I am not entirely sure. Nextcloud is a rather complicated service and I haven’t looked at it in all detail. I am just assuming that when you create a user account it creates a user directory for you inside the Nextcloud “black box” for a lack of a better term and everything outside of that is by default not available to you. I know you can add external storage to the Nextcloud instance. I guess the user has than also access to that storage from his home folder, but I am not sure how this works under the hood.

Two ways: 1. the more important the data, the more mature and hopefully with longer support the app needs to be. Documents and photos are important. Game roms are not. 2. Only choose apps that don’t store the data in a proprietary format. Both paperless and immich like their folder structures and naming, but it’s still pdfs, jpgs and heic underneath. This way of I need to move apps, at most, metadata is lost.

That is very much my philosophy. I wouldn’t consider switching to a service that stores my data in some weird proprietary format or database where I can’t get the originals out of.

That very much sounds like me, glad I am not alone :) Your way of giving this control over to the different services is definitely an option I am thinking about. I am just not sure this is the right step to do. As you said, it might take some time to get used to it and might also require some restructuring of my data, but in the end you probably get the most out of each of these services as well.

What type of documents do you process with Paperless? Only “official” documents such as invoices, insurance documents etc. or also others like e.g. a letter to Santa Claus that you wrote as a kid? Only PDFs or also office type documents using Tika and Gotenberg? Do any of the documents change after you added them to Paperless? If so, how do you handle that?

As I have said in the other comment: I already use Docker and docker-compose for all the services I host. They are also all configured to use bind mounts instead of volume mounts, so that I am in control where everything is located. I heard about Proxmox, but I never really looked into it because never saw the need for something different than a docker container. I also don’t have a dedicated server. All my services are running as Docker containers directly on the NAS.

I am not a fan of data duplication, disk space aside. You are pretty much guaranteed to have diverging file structures sooner or later. I don’t want to look up a file on three different applications just to find the newest version of it. I know you can use rsync and a cron job, but that just adds more complexity to a problem that I don’t want to have in the first place. This might work for something like a read-only backup like i presume you do with Paperless and OpenCloud, but I am not sure how this handles a case where, at least in theory, your files can be changed, renamed etc. in multiple different locations.

How do you handle your Paperless documents? Do you have a local file structure that you manage on your own for these documents or do you shove them all into Paperless and process them entirely in there (naming, tagging, etc.)?

I get your idea of trying things out even though it might result in temporary data duplication to find the way that works best for me. I am just curious how other peoples workflow looks like. Maybe I can also learn from the mistakes other people made in the past :)

I already use Docker and docker-compose for all the services I host. They are also all configured to use bind mounts instead of volume mounts, so that I am in control where everything is located. I mainly use the official documentation although I sometimes like to check https://github.com/Haxxnet/Compose-Examples/tree/main. I didn’t came across any major problems with that workflow so far, but that is also besides the point of my original question.

Jellyfin is a good example of the workflow I had in mind. I have a media share on my NAS and just point Jellyfin to that share in the docker-compose. But that is not how things like Paperless work, at least not from my (still limited) understanding of it. I think there are other workflows, but the main one of Paperless is a consume directory and a data/media directory. Everything in the consume directory gets ingested by Paperless and is moved with (I think) a different hierarchical structure and filename to the media directory. So if I point the consume directory to my current documents share on the NAS everything is moved away. I am sure there are ways to specify how Paperless organizes the media directory, but it most certainly will not be exactly the same as before. So making the data/media directory function as my new NAS “share” will also result in a change. In addition to that, my documents share on the NAS also contains data that I probably don’t need to track with Paperless e.g. some spreadsheets. I am not sure how Paperless handles documents in the media directory that were not originally processed using the consume folder or if that is even a good idea in the first place.