Importing a paperless-ngx export

paperless-ngx ships a document exporter that writes every original file plus a manifest.json describing it. Thaw reads that manifest, so nothing you set up is lost; it just becomes hints.

1. Run the exporter

From your paperless host:

docker compose exec webserver document_exporter ../export

That writes the originals (and archived OCR copies) into the export folder alongside manifest.json. Zip the folder:

cd export && zip -r ../paperless-export.zip .

2. Get it to Thaw

Drop the ZIP on the Import page. A big export goes straight to storage in pieces, so a ten-year archive is fine from a browser, and you can close the tab once it has finished uploading.

3. What Thaw does with it

The archive is expanded in slices so a thousand-file export never times out. For each document in the manifest, Thaw imports the original file (not the archived OCR copy), and passes along as hints:

• the paperless title
• the correspondent’s name
• the document type’s name
• the tags
• the created date and the archive serial number

Thaw is told these came from a previous system and may be wrong. It confirms from the page. In practice they help a lot: a correspondent of “GEICO” and a type of “Insurance” make the reader’s job easy, and a wrong one is overridden.

4. Watch it fill in

The import page shows people and things appearing as they are found, a histogram by year, categories as they are sorted, and the first checkup items. Sorting a thousand documents takes well under an hour; the full read continues in the background, current documents first.

5. Turn the Mac mini off

Exact duplicates are recognized by content and linked, so if you exported twice, or the same bill was scanned twice in 2019, you get one document and a note. When the import shows done, the checkup will already have told you at least one thing you did not know.