

How do you deal with plain old paper mail / documents? - jurtrx

I'd be interested in hearing how you guys deal with daily plain old paper mail? Bills, insurance documents, etc. ... I'm not a big fan of folder on a shelf, etc... I'd rather scan all that stuff and archive and organize it digitally. Two requirements I have: 1) More ore less future proof solution, i.e. some software solution with a possibly open database format, API, lots of support for and by third party tools, etc. 2) Not in the cloud. I don't really want to have this documents on some remote sever but rather within my own four walls.<p>Any suggestions? Any experiences to share? Anything?
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gregjor
There are many books on basic home organization and document retention for tax
and personal purposes. 95% of what comes in the mail can go right to the
trash. All of my bills and insurance documents are already available on the
various web sites so there's no reason to keep them or file them for
posterity. Same with bank statements. Even with nearly 50 years behind me,
house, three kids, etc. I can easily keep all important paper documents in a
single plastic file box. I cull old stuff out every year while doing my taxes.
A "software solution with possibly open database format, API, lots of support
for third party tools, etc.?" Do you really need something like Documentum for
your bills and insurance card? You aren't gonna need it.

~~~
gvb
_All of my bills and insurance documents are already available on the various
web sites so there's no reason to keep them or file them for posterity._

For those documents, you are at the mercy of whoever provides the web site.
Personally, I find it hard to track that information down after a year or less
(forget the URL, forget my login, banks get acquired and systems change).

~~~
gregjor
I've never needed old bills or bank statements for more than a few days --
long enough to check them over and pay. My credit union has a bill pay service
that retrieves electronic copies of most of my bills so they're in one place.
I have a free password manager that remembers and autofills URLs and logins.

You have your own needs, but really why do you need to keep electronic copies
of every document indefinitely? Archiving all of those ephemeral bits of paper
seems like a waste of time, a kind of electronic hoarding that serves no
useful purpose.

In 50 years I've never once needed to produce an old utility bill or pay stub
or bank statement; I keep things I need for tax purposes according to IRS
retention rules but very little of my paperwork is relevant to my taxes. I
scan a few things to PDF and keep those electronically but I don't have enough
scanned documents to require more than some named folders to organize them.

There are high-end document management systems used by companies that need to
manage and keep lots of documents (like utilities, banks, and credit card
companies), so if you really need such a system you can look at the standards
and tools already invented for businesses instead of re-inventing that wheel.

------
gvb
A fairly future-proof solution is to scan the documents into an open format
and save them as files in a simple file system (a subdirectory per year is
probably sufficient). I would name the files YYYY-MM-
DD-<short_description>.pdf so they sort properly in the directory listing.

For the scanned format, I would suggest PDF (OCRed to text would be nice to
help with searching) or PNG.

You will have plenty of warning before PDF (PNG) or the file system of choice
goes obsolete and will be able to transcode/copy the data to the new format.

Storage media is troublesome. CDs (DVDs) have a limited shelf life, see
<http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/sec4.html>. I would suggest creating
a checksum (e.g. MD5 or SHA) to at detect corruption.

Hard drives are mechanical and can fail unexpectedly. Hard drives also have an
interface (IDE/SATA/etc) obsolescence issue, although you should have plenty
of warning before the interface is totally unsupported.

Solid state drive (e.g. thumbdrives) also have lifetime concerns. The normal
concern, write wear-out, should not be an issue, but the flash can lose its
bits over the years. Grabbing a Spansion flash data sheet semi-randomly, it
lists the data retention lifetime as 20 years.
([http://www.spansion.com/Support/Datasheets/S25FL032P_00_05_e...](http://www.spansion.com/Support/Datasheets/S25FL032P_00_05_e.pdf)).

If you are moderately paranoid, saving your data on two disparate media (e.g.
DVD and thumb drives), saving one copy off-site, and rewriting onto new media
periodically, say every 10 years, should go a long way.

On the other hand, since most legal record keeping requirements are 7 years
(IANAL - don't take my word on it), you probably can just let your data die
with the media.

