Have you ever tried to find a document from your personal archive? When enough time passes, you probably won’t remember where it’s located anymore. You probably remember something about the document, such as:
No matter if your hierarchical archive is structured under date, category or keyword, you will inevitably fail to find the documents you’re looking for, because the simple file structure does not allow efficient search and is always tied to a single context.
Virtualpaper does not store documents in a hierarchical tree-like file structure. Rather, it uses a flat file hierarchy and tries to leverage key-value metadata and a really fast full-text-search. The idea is simple: always store enough relevant metadata for the document. Metadata allows storing same documents under multiple contexts. Metadata is user configurable and could something like:
After filling out metadata, it is possible to filter the documents using any of the metadata. Now you not only have your early folders with you, but you also have “folders” by Author, Category, Project and so on. By combining the metadata filters you can narrow the results as much as needed.
Virtualpaper is not intended to be used as a storage while actively editing the files itself. It is not a document storage in that sense. Virtualpaper is intended to be an archive, where files are left to dust until one needs to find them again. Virtualpaper is a really simple application. It’s main focus will be on one thing: finding documents fast.