this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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What document management solution are you using? (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by tab87vn@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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So I'm setting up a home server for personal purposes, among which, storing personal documents/files.. accumulated over the years is now my next target. I've already had:

- Nextcloud to upload/sync files from my mobile devices

- Calibre to manage ebooks, magazines

- Jellyfin to manage multimedia files, including photos

I'm looking for a solution to upload/manage documents. Could be my Ids, could be my rental contract, or recovery passphrases for my accounts, etc.

There are a lot that can be found from here:

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#document-management---integrated-library-systems-ils

But I'd love to get real experience and advice. Something that can run with docker and maybe, probably integrate nicely with the rest of the above stuff.

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[–] lilolalu@alien.top 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Nextcloud works great for document management, if you additionally install tesseract OCR and Elasticsearch. Then you can use any smartphone document-scanner (I personally use "swift scan") to add new documents via WebDAV Upload, but I think most of them support WebDAV nowadays. The Nextcloud app even has a document scanner feature built in, but it's not very good.

I have been reading about the features of paperless-ng and I don't see what that software additionally brings to the table that a properly setup nextcloud cannot do. Only that I have Nextcloud anyways and it can do much more than document management and I love to have all aspects of my "personal cloud" in one software tool.

[–] ceciltech@alien.top 2 points 11 months ago

Tesseract OCR

I am very unclear on what happens with the OCR output and how that is associated with the file and how it os searched?

[–] notdoreen@alien.top 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

An SMB share from a Windows server VM. I've also been playing around with paperless but honestly I trust the SMB share way more and it's so much easier for me to not fuck up and lose all my data like I've done in the past playing with Docker containers.

[–] Silencer306@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

How do you lose the data playing with docker containers?

[–] reen444@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

You just have to set the media folder for paperless right, and you could just use SMB to access the files and have both optionms. Don't store data inside containers, not just for paperless.

[–] tab87vn@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

I'd honestly prefer something web-based with phone apps. I'll rather be careful with volume mounting and make additional copies of files, including cloud backup, to avoid data loss.

[–] I_want_pudim@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Jellyfin for photos? But why? You have nextcloud that does it better, and you can have immich that does it even better.

Whats the appeal of Jellyfin for this purpose? Like you won't ever sync, it's just photos stored somewhere for people to see?

[–] tab87vn@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, jellyfin is more on the consuming side of the stacks. I have NextCloud that does most of the uploading/synching business, getting photos from my phones or tablets or laptop; qbittorrent for taking movies around and put in on the disk, etc.

Eventually all those data would be on a directory on the computer disk and that's where the consuming side starts.

It really does not have to be Jellyfin that does the photos job, but it's already there for music and movies and photo display seems decent. Of course I'm still experimenting (atm trying also Photoprism) so if there's a better option, please feel free to recommend.

[–] thies226j@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Mayan-EDMS has a steep learning curve but is really useful.

[–] Athensz343@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Bro! I just came on this subreddit right now, to ask about the very same situation! In my case, I have well over 900 PDF documents, which a lot of them i transfered from my phone to computer. Then a good majority of them are full books, which I'ved OCR-processed and then turned into ebook format for Calibre web-server.

But the others are legal documents, tax documents, instruction manuals, research papers, etc.