After reading many blog posts and threads on the subreddits /r/paperless and /r/privacytoolsIO, I’m finally happy with my paperless setup and ready to share it.

This post will explain why I decided to go paperless and what mix of hardware and software I ended up with to keep my data safe and accessible on all my devices. I hope it will convince you to make the jump too.

Going Paperless

I’m not a fan of paperwork. I don’t like having to store hundreds of paper sheets in a drawer to archive my pay sheets, bank account agreements, tax returns, etc. I can see at least four drawbacks with keeping these sensitive documents in their original paper format:

I can’t access these documents away from home.

It’s tedious to keep all this paperwork organized enough to make searching for a specific document reasonably quick.

It starts to take up a lot of space in the little storage offered by my flat.

It’s insecure as they could be stolen by housebreakers or burned in a fire.

These are all usual motives pushing people to go paperless. But in the end, what really convinced me to make the switch was that it simply did not feel right. All this paper definitely does not spark joy. It’s clutter. And so, as Marie Kondo would say it, I decided to get rid of it:

The criterion for deciding what to keep and what to discard is whether or not something sparks joy.

Scanning Documents

The Brother DS-620 can scan cards, photos, A4 documents, etc.

There are many techniques to scan documents: smartphone apps such as CamScanner, connected high-end scanners like the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 or portable scanners such as the doxie go or the Brother DS-620. I chose the last one because it’s really small and good looking, supports multi page PDFs and more importantly it does not have the upload-to-cloud feature that I don’t want for reasons you will see below.

Every time I receive a document that I need to keep, I plug the scanner to my laptop and press the scan button. In a handful of seconds, I get a nice PDF on my SSD.

Side Note on OCR

I tried a bunch of ways to extract the text from the scanned documents with optical character recognition software but didn’t get satisfactory results. I hacked with these open source projects: unpaper, Tesseract, and the integrated Paperless. However, probably because the scanned PDF is a little bit skewed and with black borders, the extracted text always contains several mistakes. I think I will try to find solutions for this in the future but in the meantime I will live without full-text search ability. Finding a document by its name on my computer is already a much better experience than finding one specific sheet in a stack of paper.

Keeping Privacy in Mind

Once an important document is scanned, I need to store it in a safe digital place. Meaning that it should meet these seemingly conflicting requirements:

reliable and distributed storage. I don’t want to only keep this data on my personal laptop. Indeed, if something bad happens to it, I would loose all my documents. Instead, I want to rely on proven and easy-to-use cloud services such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

no one should be able to access the data without my consent. The scanned documents are meant to be private and must remain so. I have nothing to hide but I still care a lot about privacy. Edward Snowden made a good analogy on this:

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

The Beauty of Cryptomator

The best way I found to conciliate the above requirements is Cryptomator. It’s an open source project — so we can be sure there is no back-doors —which uses what they call transparent encryption.

How you see your files vs. what gets uploaded on the cloud.

It means you won’t notice any difference in working with your files.

While the vault containing the encrypted data resides somewhere in a cloud folder, Cryptomator provides a virtual hard drive through which the files can be accessed.

If you are interested in the technical details of how this works, you can check their convincing security architecture page.

I installed Cryptomator on my laptop, created a vault with a target direcory under my Dropbox folder. I can now read, write and organize my documents in the vault as if they were on a conventional USB flash drive. Cryptomator maintains an encrypted copy of this in-memory vault that stays synced on all my devices thanks to the Dropbox desktop application.

Here is a tip if you want even more distributed storage: put your Dropbox folder under your Google Drive one for instance and your documents will then be backed up by Google servers too.

With this setup, we benefit from Dropbox reliable and cheap storage without sacrificing privacy as, without the vault password, no one can decrypt the documents. Cryptomator also comes as an application for iOS or Android if you want to access your files on the go!

So, are you ready to go paperless ?