[pw0nka]

Looks great. Love the idea behind it, but...

There is at least one country (mine - Switzerland) which is not able to use software like yours. The problems are the current laws that force people and organizations to store physical copies of the documents (for several years). Electronic documents have no value in front of the law, which is why we have no choice but to do all of that offline, manually.

I've tried many archiving solutions, but non of them saved any bit of time. The one single, missing feature was an automatism to print a serial code (the electronic document ID) back on the original document. This way you could just scan it, print it, put it in a large box where you sort it by its ID - that simple. And this would even work if you would use spacers to split the documents on the scanning process.

[anotheryou]

There is a proprietary solution for it, sadly overpriced and cloud-based. But the principle could be implemented in any software:

Shoe Box + QR, you fill linearly and always snap the QR with the scan. It than can tell you at roughly which height in the stack and in which shoe box something is.

edit: here: https://box.fileee.com/

[pw0nka]

Thank you. This brings up another problem we have with our laws: Corporates are not allowed to store such documents on servers which are outside of our country. And that's usually the case with clouds services, because of obvious reasons.

[kuschku]

That’s not a problem with your laws, but more a problem with SaaS. Data should always stay as local as possible, ideally even within of your own organization.

[myaso]

How is keeping data local a good idea? Given how often there is a major breach reported, everything points to this being the opposite -- there aren't enough security specialists to go around for every company. Why not take advantage of the work done by the major cloud providers or SaaS companies instead of redoing everything in house all the time. It's like people want to actually solve the same problems over and over for eternity.

[kuschku]

> How is keeping data local a good idea?

Sometimes you want to avoid competitors, or foreign governments, or intelligence agencies from accessing your data. Sometimes you want to avoid any kind of tracking or metadata analysis. Sometimes you want to avoid external points of failure.

Often it is cost - even including wages, AWS or GCP are a factor 10 to 100 more expensive than what you can run on rented dedicated systems from a local hoster, or by colocating. Even your own datacenter can be cheaper, and end up with identical uptime.

And then there's a question of trust. A simple question: Would you trust a Chinese SaaS company to securely store all your customer's data, and run all your services? Would you trust a Romanian one? Why would I trust an American one?

[jopsen]

I have always archived my documents by throwing them in an unsorted black box.

If someone really need me to retrieve an old document. It'll take forever to find, but why would I want to pay sorting costs upfront?

[copperx]

Because you often need documents on stressful occasions such after the death of a family member, after an accident, after losing your job, after an IRS audit. You really want to be going over n documents with the possibility of missing one or more during such times?

[outsideoflife]

Because some businesses generate very large volumes of documents that have to be stored

[ar0]

Can you elaborate on the laws you mention a bit? I understand that there are requirements for organizations (GebüV and VAT-related laws), but for people? Which documents do you need to store physically as a private individual in Switzerland?

[pw0nka]

I'm not an attorney, so I can't give you the exact references to laws. Basically you are not obligated to store those documents as a private person, as long as you don't need to show them to a judge during a court case. That's why I'm a bit on the paranoid side, because you never know when you might need a specific document to prove something. In my case I do store all the documents which were signed (e.g. contracts) or are government related.

[tehabe]

You could store them chronically on paper and do the actual sorting on your computer or server.