[andrew_eu]

I've been using Paperless for several years now very happily and can recommend it over my previous system, also Google Drive. During the transition I found it helpful to set up a cron which (A) made an export of Paperless and (B) uploaded that export to a Google Drive folder.

One feature which seems to be quite a nice improvement (speculating as I haven't upgraded yet) is consumption templates [0]. My workflow involves an ADF scanner with an Android application, sharing the scanned PDF with Paperless Share [1] and then it's uploaded to the server via API. It seems that consumption templates will enable adjusting tags/sharing settings/permissions of a document at ingestion time based on where it's ingested from.

[0] https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/pull/4196

[1] https://github.com/qcasey/paperless_share

[itchynosedev]

I use syncthing to sync from paperless data folder which runs on Kubernetes (k3s).

It's a one-way sync. Paperless is the authoritative location. The only reason I back up to Google drive is so that my phone has easy access to the documents I may need on the go.

[tedcrilly]

There are two dedicated mobile apps for Paperless: - https://github.com/paulgessinger/swift-paperless (iOS only, nicer interface) - https://github.com/bauerj/paperless_app (iOS and Android, built in scanner)

I use them in combination with Tailscale, both can be used to rename documents and edit tags.

[benhurmarcel]

Could you specify how it improves over using Google Drive or similar? Is that "just" because you control the hosting, or is the experience better?

[andrew_eu]

Personally, I think it isn't really an improvement over Google Drive. Drive offers so many more features, an office suite, integration with many other Google services, etc.

That said, I don't think Paperless is supposed to fill all those gaps. For me, its sole job is to make scanned documents searchable (from anywhere with Tailscale) and durable (with encrypted off-site backups). Having this isolated from a Google account with already too-far-reaching access is a benefit in my opinion.

Edit: rereading the context, I think you were referring to how I used Google Drive before Paperless. In that case I just stored scans in Google Drive. I struggled to organize consistently and search was lackluster. Paperless improves on these, but also is much more hackable. It's easy to set up post ingestion scripts, backups, email ingestion, etc.