

My Paperless Personal Finance System - gnosis
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2008/05/20/my-paperless-personal-finance-system-a-work-in-progress/

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supercanuck
I actually use something similar but instead of coming up with a naming
convention, I have my SnapScan scan it, OCR it, then send to Evernote.

This process is literally one button. The ability to bring up receipts via
Search that are 6-12 months old, is worth the cost of the Fujitsu SnapScan +
Evernote IMO.

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gnosis
Are you concerned at all about privacy?

Is it prudent to send private data to some third party that could misuse it or
have the data stolen from it?

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daydream
For this reason I have all my personal finance data on an encrypted disk
image, backed up offsite to a service that lets me provide my own
encryptionkey for the backups. It's more manual than one click to evernote,
but I am concerned about security/privacy.

~~~
gnosis
If you are providing them with just a key, you are still trusting them to do
the encryption right.

Better to encrypt it yourself, in my opinion.

Also, even if you encrypt it yourself but upload it somewhere, it's possible
that the encryption will be cracked at some point in the future (with
sufficient advance of technology).

So the safest way (in terms of privacy) is not to send backups offsite at all,
or at least to make sure they're physically secure from anyone else getting
their hands on them.

~~~
daydream
> If you are providing them with just a key, you are still trusting them to do
> the encryption right. Better to encrypt it yourself, in my opinion.

I _am_ encrypting it myself, in addition to the backup being encrypted.

> Also, even if you encrypt it yourself but upload it somewhere, it's possible
> that the encryption will be cracked at some point in the future (with
> sufficient advance of technology). So the safest way (in terms of privacy)
> is not to send backups offsite at all, or at least to make sure they're
> physically secure from anyone else getting their hands on them.

Yes, those things are true. However - this system is a blend of convenience,
security, and disaster recovery that works for me. Nothing is foolproof, but
this lets me sleep at night, and IMHO provides more than reasonable security.

