2013-04-23 Documents

What's a good way to maintain a digital version of paper documents?

You'd think it's rather easy, since the whole idea of files inside folders that computers are using is taken from paper documents.

But I thought I'd be clever and use tags instead.

For a while I thought I wanted a collection of files that are not defined by their location in a rigid folder structure, but by a set of tags. But it was a disaster. New documents would get an incomplete set of tags, and the number of tags available would grow out of bounds.
For example: The invoice for the phone/internet bill would obviously get the "bill" tag. And the "Telecom" tag, too. (Before I finally gave up on them and switched to Telstra Clear, which then was re-branded by/to Vodafone.) Most bills also got the "money" tag. But eventually I realized that almost all letters I get are because someone wants my money. So the "money" tag was pretty much everywhere, and therefore not very useful. If everyone is special, no-one is.

So now I've moved back to a folder hierarchy, with the additional constraint that the hard-copies must be organized in exactly the same way. So for example, every bank has its own folder. It contains a folder for each bank account, and each of those has a "letters" and a "statements" folder in it. And that's where the individual documents (named "YYYY-mm-dd nn.jpg") go.

Overkill? Maybe. Very rigid? Definitely! But the tags didn't out for me, so maybe less freedom is better.

Why keep a digital copy of every letter, invoice and bank statement, anyway? Well... two answers.

One: Some bills only exist digitally. Telecom bills, for example, are sent out as links to PDF files. And Powershop (the electricity company) doesn't even do that. They just send you an email to let you know that they'll withdraw money next week, unless you top up your account first.

And two: I'm a data hog. I like the idea of not depending on physical paperwork. Sure, some pieces of paper are more important than others (birth certificates, diplomas and passports come to mind), but I want to be able to read my first tenancy contract (Waldfischbach!) whenever I feel like it, without having to haul actual paper halfway around the planet. That'll have to come in handy eventually. Maybe.