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In my effort to reduce my life\'s clutter, I\'ve bought a scanner, and scanned t

ID: 661758 • Letter: I

Question

In my effort to reduce my life's clutter, I've bought a scanner, and scanned the thousands of paper documents scattered around my house.

To make this worthwhile I need a software which will enable me to save all these documents securely, as well as allow me to find the ones I need when I need them.

I need a program which can:

Store and index thousands of documents (PDF, PNG, etc. either OCRed or not)
Be secure (some of those documents are very private - bank statements, etc.) - meaning client side encryption.
Provide some back-up solution (for the possibility of my PC frying with all my paper history...)
Allow for day-to-day management and addition of new documents
Store document's date (which should be editable, since it might not be the date it was scanned/inserted to the system)
Have some cloud features (search anywhere) - advantage

I'm using a Windows 7 machine.

Note

Although I've posted the answer of what I use as a solution, I am very interested to hear of other solutions, as mine is a little convoluted... Anyone?

Explanation / Answer

Currently I use Evernote to store and index all my documents.

How does it match the requirements?

Store and index thousands of documents: that's its main usecase
Allow for day-to-day management: very easily add and tag documents
Store document's date: in Evernote, you can easily edit an entry's Created at field, which elegantly solves the initial porting problem.
Cloud features: by default all documents are available online.

Where it falls short

Be secure - client side encryption: Evernote does not provide client side encryption. Since this is very critical for me, I use Evernote's private notebook feature for my scanned documents. This of course negates the backup feature of Evernote...
Provide backup solution: Since I'm not using Evernote's cloud feature, I need to provide my own backup solution. For that I use CrashPlan Pro, with which I backup Evernote's database file (%PROGRAM_DATA%/Evernote/Databases). CrashPlan uses client-encryption, and incremental change support, so it is very well fitted for this need.

Here are my experiences at scanning, backing up and indexing my paperless office.

I would like to know if there is a more stream-lined solution out there, which does not require me to weave two programs to fit all my needs...

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