
Ask HN: How do you organize/store your personal information and documents? - brittpart_
Doing some research from an Executive Assistant&#x27;s perspective on how other people keep their information organized.<p>Link or comment &gt; https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.surveymonkey.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ZPS5XXX
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slovette
I think this is one of those easily over-thought of things.

I keep a digital file system the same as my parents used to keep their filing
cabinet. Alphabetized folders. Each person in the family (me, wife & kids) has
their own folder with all their stuff in it. I have every important document
scanned and saved as PDFs. The physical originals live in a real file folder
of the same name and organized structure inside the filing cabinet in the
closet.

Product receipts for warranties and docs, insurance declarations, taxes,
credit card agreements and scanned card copies, etc all organized as you’d
typically see in a real filing cabinet with their digital PDF counterparts
inside a digital folder.

This is all stored using iCloud Drive (we’re an Apple family) that’s
accessible from all my devices. It’s actually been a life saver several times
while on travel. Wife lost her passport once coming back from Mexico, being
able to pull up a PDF scan kept us from being trapped outside the country.

Some things we really don’t need a SAAS product for. Just create folders and
take care to keep them up to date and organized as you would an old school
filing cabinet.

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dhruvkar
Do you find value in keeping the hard copy?

I've been scanning all documents for 6 years now, and over that time, I have 4
buckets:

A. scan and file

B. scan and throw

C. scan and shred

D. just throw

Scanner OCRs the docs and drops them into Dropbox (unlimited business plan).

I found that A is a very very tiny minority (1-5%) of all documents.

~~~
slovette
So, 2 things:

1\. I like OCR, but I don’t like relying on it for search in a vast pool of
important documents. Filing in labeled folders means I’m not relying on some
obscure algorithm or the accuracy of an OCR tech to make my digital files
practical/accessible. This proved the correct way to think when I moved files
from Dropbox, to GDrive and then ultimately iCloud. One service would find
what I wanted, the next would not or find some file based on an unexpected
match. All that meant I had to spend a significant time digging around. With
folders, I have manual organization as a base and can still use search and OCR
as a convenience.

2\. I find value in the physical files only as a basic backup to a digital
outage. Computer fails, phone is left somewhere, internet goes out, etc. it’s
not all happened at once yet, but there has been several occasions where just
going into the closet and grabbing the hard file was easiest.

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nikivi
I keep things in markdown files. Private files go in folder that's git
ignored.

[https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge](https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge)

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sloaken
Do you keep personal items there too? Like copy of birth certificate or
passport? Or are those in your gitignore areas?

~~~
nikivi
Those are in 1password.

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notadog
I don't personally use it, but many of my coworkers and friends use Evernote
for keeping their information organized.

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itsmeamario
I use a markdown blog with Github Pages. This way I have my notes online and
can access them every time I need them.

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mraza007
I use github markdown or vimwiki sometimes.

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vira28
Using Typora pretty much.

