This. I also purchased a ScanSnap iX1600 at the beginning of march this year and it’s been the best move I’ve done.
As soon as I get new paper, this goes straight to the scanner (which saves directly on the NAS) and immediately afterwards to the bin
interesting… you do everything with mobile phone (and/or tablet) only ?
I don’t do much, and iPhone would be my main gui.
if I need more, e.g. my taxes to be on topic with personal finance, that’s pretty much a larger screen with a browser and a keyboard that I need, not worth maintaining a personal computer.
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I hate doing stuff on my phone.
I want multiple giant screens and a nice mechanical keyboard to do the typing.
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I saw Brother and ScanSnap series were both highly recommended. I went with the Brother ADS-4300N as I specifically wanted something with no screen and only hardware buttons. So it was a bit of an older model which required some fussing to get integrated (I had to create a VM with special downgraded security due to old crypto libraries on the scanner).
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Would it be dumb to use the scanner in my office? Bring everything, digitalize everything and send it to my gmail address? Don‘t feel like I want to spend 300 bucks on a scanner 
Also not sure about naming and folder structure.
It’s what I used to do, but the process was:
- Take stuff to office
- Badge in on the scanner. Wait until logged in.
- Set some settings as the defaults were always not suitable
- Put in scanner and scan
- Logout
- Got to my computer and wait for email
- Forward email to my personal email address
- Take papers back home
- File papers
New process:
- Take paper to my home office
- Turn on scanner
- Scan pages
- Put paper in box
- Turn off scanner
I can’t explain it, but getting the scanner was a major quality of life improvement for me. It’s not just the paper handling. There was some mental load that was lifted.
I’m pretty frugal, so spending $300 on a scanner to scan a handful of documents each week didn’t come easily, but I figured for something that was going to last years and would save me time and hassle it was fine. I wasted money on far worse electronic gadgets. Had I known the mental benefits, it would have been a nobrainer.
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Mainly I validate ebills, place market orders, send/receive messages and post on this forum. And take random pics. I would hate to do more on a phone as well. So I don’t do it. When necessary, I get access to a browser a screen and a keyboard.
I have the feeling that part of that “feeling good” is because you bought a cool gadget.
Or you were worried that a sysadmin can read the cache of the scanner or its outbox. That’s my main issue but I don’t care anymore.
It’s more like the feeling you get when you de-clutter or spring clean/throw away old stuff.
The new gadget buzz has long gone (not sure it was really there as it is a boring device) - but the feeling of well-being persists.
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Maybe consider https://docs.paperless-ngx.com given that you’re already down the rabbit hole 
I used to run Synology years ago. Nowadays I use customized hardware and Unraid. System uses 25W idle in C-10 with HDDs spun down. Current setup and Docker containers with sensitive stuff redacted:
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Where does the paper come from in the first place?
My “digital” and “admin” life:
Insurances: apps + ebill
Credit card: apps and ebill
Rent: standing order
3a: standing order
Banking and trading and whatever finance: apps
Phone: ebill
Messaging and very few emails: apps
Doctor appointments: app
Films and music: apps
Maps and navigation and transport: apps
Taxes: desktop browser and e-docs
Pictures and videos: phone and iCloud
Job: e documents to online drive
Mobile browser …
nothing (except taxes) that is cumbersome to deal with on a small screen -and I prefer buying my train ticket on iPhone SBB app fwiw, also it avoids spending hours on it. Until I decided to post here 
It goes with getting rid of a lot of stuff I actually didn’t find any enjoyment to deal with. Some were not a choice at beginning (shit happens.). But these has extended my will to shrink down everything to the minimum. Ultimate declutterring. I’m asset light, I don’t buy stuff, I don’t manage stuff but liquid assets.
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Wow. That’s a crazy amount of storage.
I repurposed old PC parts to build my own server and it runs at 39W idle, but 9W of that is a beefy GPU.
My server:
# zpool list
NAME ALLOC FREE FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT
lexar 1.56T 6.42T 3% 19% 1.00x ONLINE -
tank 2.75T 6.47T 0% 29% 1.00x ONLINE -
$ docker ps
IMAGE NAMES
valkey/valkey-bundle:9.0.0-rc3 valkey
ghcr.io/berriai/litellm:main-latest litellm
fn2:latest fn2
pgvector/pgvector:pg18-trixie exppg
scanner:latest scanner
ghcr.io/requarks/wiki:2 wiki
ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:git-53764fe open-webui
pgvector/pgvector:pg17 pg
dyndns-multi dyndns
pihole/pihole:latest pihole
kokoro-fastapi-kokoro-tts kokoro
vllm/vllm-openai:nightly vllm
ghcr.io/huggingface/text-embeddings-inference:latest tei
quay.io/jupyter/pytorch-notebook:cuda12-python-3.12 jupyter
(none) seaweedfs
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- Job
- Pillar 2
- Kids: school, activities
- Various insurances
- Tradesmen (home maintenance)
- UK Bank
- UK creditcards
- Various invoices
- UK Taxes
- UK NI
- Swiss Taxes
- Repeat paperwork for invoices, taxes and property for rental property in another Canton
You should run a k8s cluster imho.
None of them can be edocs in the first place? Weird.
Well home ownership, yep, papers… I got rid of that too. Ended up being a job. Was fun to make a great project, learn stuff, make money out of it, not the opex.
I have been running a Synology NAS since 2012, bought a new one in 2019 because of separation, the original one was still doing fine in 2021 when I left it to my-ex with all the kids photos on it. Currently running RAID6.
I’m currently using ~5TB on the Synology with space going to (from biggest to smallest):
- Mac backups (time machine) 2TB
- Videos 1.5TB
- Users’ files (5 users) 1.3TB
- Containers files (docker) 0.16TB
- photos, music, pc backups, others for the rest
I scan all incoming mail as soon as I open it (since 2013, now with a Canon MF633 printer/scanner directly saving to the NAS). As others have already pointed out, this is absolutely a time saving and peace of mind marvel, it has saved me hassle and money many many times over the cost of the setup.
All my working documents on the Mac are realtime sync’d to the NAS.
I have tried paperless-ng for my scans, but I already have a working naming system for the files (plus OCR) so I didn’t find it particularly useful.
Now I just bought a new NAS (Minisforum N5, TrueNAS to be installed). One of the NASes will stay at my son’s place and I’ll run reciprocal backups between them.
Time to buy bigger disks to have space for the backups, I’m afraid.
I find this setup very useful and worth the upfront cost: today’s cost for my Synology setup would be around 1’500 francs disks included, so far barely more than 200/year.
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I avoided docker for a long time as it climbs the complexity curve, but had to when it came to LLMs as the dependencies are crazy. In the end, I was glad to learn to use this and deploy even my own self-written services as docker containers.
For the same reason, I avoided k8s, but have started investigating k3s as a simplified way of deploying and might experiment with that, but it would be more for self-interest to learn k3s.
How are you doing it? Rsync? Or with some MacOS mechanism?