[theomega]

I want to show an alternative approach to managing your documents:

Store them in your IMAP/Mails. Either on an own account or in a dedicated sub-folder.

I wrote some small python scripts [1] which allow you to: - Add an email with the PDF attached to your document collection. The script supports adding a subject and adding tags to it - Go over all the emails and run an OCR (tesseract) on them: Attach the OCR result together with the pdf to the email.

Big advantage: - Search on IMAP is a solved problem - Clients for every operating system in the world, including web, mobile - Super simple backup and restore

Over course, very geeky, nothing for your parents, but maybe something for you?

[1]: https://github.com/theomega/IMAP_DMS

[mdaniel]

Just ensure you pick a "good" encoding scheme, because base64-ing PDFs will balloon that storage space in a very big hurry

[JohnStrange]

Don't you have to run your own IMAP server for that to work?

Although my mail provider is fairly generous about storage space, it's not unlimited.

[theomega]

Depends on two things: Your space and your privacy requirements. Google Mail works for example if you are willing to trust Google. A lot of email providers offer you a lot of space.