Ask HN: What's your personal document management system?
1 comments
i had the same issues especially with photos. As a phd student working in the lab and field, i took many photos over a week that spanned several categories (lab,field, testing, sample prep). many photos belonged to more than one category. at the end of the day (figuratively), i would just sort photos by date.
now i am working on cloud platform with interfaces with a mobile app. i sort photos on the upstream end as i take them with my phone camera, by appropriately tagging and captioning them, and i manage on the web platform.
photos can have multiple tags, can be sorted spatially on a map as well as by time. very very convenient and excelling documentation for my phd work
What do you do to organize, both your digital and your physical, documents? It doesn't have to be an uber cool document handling robot you've built, but some of your practices might help other people (and me) improve their own.
I'll answer first:
1. All my physical files (degrees, healthcare records, old photographs, land ownership records, identification records, marriage certificate, etc) go in one big file without any real organization. Every "person", though, gets their own file — unless it's a record with multiple people, that goes in my file for no real reason.
2. Scanned copies, or digital documents are organized into categories "educational", "government", "employment", "tax", "misc", etc. and are named according to the person, issue date, and classification. Etc: amin-government-id-2013, amin-education-bsc-transcript-lse-2015, etc. These go in my Google Drive and my Keybase private folder. Some also go in my Google Photos in a separate album because they're essentially just photos and my wife can access them easily there through shared galleries.