Is Mariner Software (marinersoft.com), makers of Paperless dead?

[adib]

I know DEVONthink is overkill, but DEVONtechnologies has been around a long time, and they continually update their software (and it's not subscription based!); so I may just suck it up and try migrating things and see if I can't create a workflow that'll be somewhat similar to Paperless.

Guess what, DEVONthink is subscription-based starting on 4.x

 

[noraa]

Guess what, DEVONthink is subscription-based starting on 4.x

Well yes and no. You get one-year of updates included in the price, and after that you'll need to extend your license for another year. However, the program will continue to work just fine after that year, just no more updates. With a true subscription the program will just stop working after the subscription expires, so this is significantly better.

 

[TLMurray23]

I used Mariner for a few items, one of which was Paperless. I contacted them and asked something about "what happens when you go out of business?" I honestly don't remember the answer, but it was something I did not care for – so I decided to go back to the manual route.

I believe my method will withstand the test of time.

• Paper receipts are scanned to PDF then OCRed. If a receipt needs more info, I'll add it in a manual text block. I don't like using Adobe's Acrobat because it's expensive, and it still requires Rosetta for Mac. However, its indexing function is great, and no one else offers that, so I'm stuck with it.

• Paper receipts (and other important docs) are scanned and saved as a PDF. I mention PDF a lot because, unlike so many software titles and formats, PDF is going to last a very long time. If I get something in a popular graphic format, I might leave it as is; if it's oddball, I convert it to JPEG or PNG.

• If the file type supports metadata, I add that.

Then there are file names of the format "yyyymmdd-Vendor and info"; for example, "20251003-OfficeDepot Paper Ink Paperclips.pdf". I use yearmonthday (with leading zeros) because that format will sort forever (well, until the year 9999, so I think I have my life covered) and always sorts properly.

Some phone calls include time, as in 20251003_1424-IRS_LarrySmith.m4a. I use a 24-hour clock.

Here is the part very few people believe: A lot of transactions are recorded on green, multi-column ledger paper. Yes, much into software also, but I do have the paper!

 

[CalMin]

Well yes and no. You get one-year of updates included in the price, and after that you'll need to extend your license for another year. However, the program will continue to work just fine after that year, just no more updates. With a true subscription the program will just stop working after the subscription expires, so this is significantly better.

100%. Love the way they did this.

I've been a Devonthink user for years now and one of my fears was that if they don't sell new copies, they might cease to exist. I paid once, years ago, and wondered how they were able to keep developing the software and sending me updates.

This new model is great and seems more sustainable for the company. It's a subscription model where you can drop out at anytime. Unlike most subs, where you have nothing to show for your investment as soon as you stop paying, with Devonthink you can keep using the version you paid for, for as long as it works. More companies should do this.

 

[Nermal]

That's a "real" subscription model. Think of a subscription to a magazine: when it lapses, you can keep all your existing issues, but you won't get any new ones. Compare with the rental model that many companies are using, with their marketing departments calling them "subscriptions" to try to lessen the blow.

 

[drukepple]

If there is any good workflow for migrating out of Paperless, aside from manual labour, I would love to know too.

I'm going to give Alinof Archives a try. Does anyone have a good workflow to migrate data from Paperless over - I have about 10 yrs worth of stuffs and the thought of doing manually just kill me.

Thanks to the post by JustARumor, I investigated the SQLite database, and thought I'd post my solution if anyone is in need of it, or can build on it.

This is just to export the files into a meaningful file and folder structure. It's a start for importing to somewhere else.

I wrote it in NodeJS (TypeScript, actually). I suspect you could do this in a self-contained Ruby or Python script but I'm just more fluent in JS. I used Paperless basically as a digital filing cabinet, not caring as much about tracking receipts and more about scanning/saving documents that I would have, 20 years ago, kept in a filing cabinet. Financial statements, tax documents, automotive records, etc. So I did not focus on the aspect of capturing the "amount paid" data or anything like that. I simply wanted to extract my PDFs from the .paperless library and get them into my file system, ideally with some form of organization that resembles the categories I used in Paperless.

So my script opens the SQLite database, gets all of the documents and the metadata I was interested in (date, categories, tags), and copies the files into a folder with a path like /category/subcategory/yyyy-mm-dd_NameOfDoc__tag1_tag2.pdf. I did not utilize tags in a terribly meaningful way so this system worked for me. More details are available at the project's repo:

GitHub - drukepple/paperless-export: Node script to copy documents from a Mariner Software Paperless library to the filesystem.

Node script to copy documents from a Mariner Software Paperless library to the filesystem. - drukepple/paperless-export

github.com

I'm sure my export is not up to everyone's needs but it got all files out of the Paperless library and onto my filesystem where I can browse folders and files and have a pretty good idea what's where.

I did not build this to run everywhere. It's a node script, with hard-coded paths and things. Download it, set it up, and read the Quickstart in the README. There is not a bunch of bulletproof error checking. My philosophy was: get this to work once, and then back to fun things.

If you're not technically minded this might be somewhat difficult to run, but I tired to write a section in the README that was beginner-friendly. It's nothing outrageously deep, if you have a software engineer buddy, they can probably help you out.

 

[sanjuro21]

Today I remembered I had 4 marinersoft licenses... that was some of my first mac software

If anyone used MacJournal, it seems that dev split off..

Dan Schimpf Software

Thanks for this! Now I gotta see if I still have any MacJournal docs left!