Import/export of meta-data

[voidyourwarranty2]

Hi,

Glad I came across a discussion of paperless-ng on Reddit - this project looks extremely promising.

Perhaps you can help me with the following questions:

1. One obvious concern when opting for a document management system is vendor lock-in. What is going to happen if I want to/have to abandon the program in 5 years. Will I still have easy access to all my documents.

What I definitely like is the approach to storing all documents in a file tree that can still be somewhat structured so that at least correspondent and date are obvious.

But as I understand it, most meta-data are only stored in the internal data base. Is it possible to make them available in some plain standard file format as well?

My company works with a bank, for example, who provide all statements and trade confirmations on an sftp server. They deposit lots of PDF/A there (exactly what you used to receive as printouts a couple of years ago). And together with each PDF the provide an XML that contains all their meta-data on that PDF.

I'd love to see this in paperless-ng. In case you need to work with your file-tree later in a way that you have not forseen, you could always run some scripts over the PDF & XML file tree and you would still have access to all meta-data you ever used. Even if you cannot or do not want to run the procedure in paperless-ng.

2. I'd love to be able to import these bank documents from their sftp server automatically. I.e. an additional import function in paperless-ng ("Import from document server") in which you configure the sftp access (host, IP, user name, certificate, password) and paperless-ng automatically consumes all new PDFs (ignoring the old ones) and also reads arbitrary key/value pairs from the associated XMLs.

Is something like that possible or do you think there is a chance it will be in the near future?

Thanks,

Void