home server

Motivation I have long been looking for a proper solution to handle all my document needs. Luckily I do not get that much actual paper mail any more, but I still struggle with proper digitalisation. Until now, I used the excellent Microsoft Lens App for Android to scan important mail and store it in a OneNote document on OneDrive. This has served me well, since OneNote also by default allows for OCR-based search, but it is lacking more sophisticated ordering techniques, making it hard to keep a clean structure. Recently, i came across the Paperless-ngx project, a refresh of the older, no-longer-maintained Paperless-ng. Paperless is a sophisticated and open source document management solution with a proper web frontend, OCR support, self-learning tagging capabilities as well as integration with mobile apps and E-Mail accounts. In this post, I will describe my local setup. Further posts will highlight some additional integrations I use as well as how I securely access it from outside. Let’s get started. My Home Server Setup My home server is a simple Intel Core i3 machine running Windows 10 and dating back to my student years of 2011. I mainly use it as a backup storage and media server machine, using Windows’ Storage Spaces as a software RAID with a few HDDs which are continually backed up using Backblaze Personal Backup. As media server I use the always-great Plex. I used to run a Windows Server instance and played with some virtualization, but in the end, it was not worth the hassle and extra cost (Backblaze Personal Backup does not support server OSes)....