Paperify

Use QR codes to backup your data on papers. Simply backup your files, print them and store them in a safe place.

Printable version of paperify

You can print the image above and include them in your backups so you would have a copy of paperify with them. :)

Requirements

Make sure you have these binaries installed on your system.

• qrencode (qrencode)
• convert (imagemagick)
• gs (ghostscript) or pdfunite to combine QR code images to a PDF for easier printing.
• zbarimg (zbar >= 0.23.1) only for decoding with digitallify.sh
• scanimage (sane-utils) only as a helper for scanning images
• img2pdf Is is only tried as an alternative to convert if policies prevent conversion.

Zbar: Binary support is just added in zbar 0.23.1 and not supported in earlier versions. Please verify that your zbar version is higher or equal to 0.23.1. You can do that by running

zbarimg --version
0.23.1

You can download and build zbar from github.com/mchehab/zbar/. Note that zbar is not required for paperify.sh It is only required for digitallify.sh decoding.

Mac OS X

To install the requirements you can use Homebrew.

brew install coreutils qrencode zbarimg

Installation

These are just bash scripts. There is no need to install them.

You can either use git to clone this repo or download it in zip.

git clone https://github.com/alisinabh/paperify.git && cd paperify
# --- OR ---
wget https://github.com/alisinabh/paperify/archive/master.zip -O paperify.zip && \
     unzip paperify.zip && cd paperify-master

Or you can use paperify's Docker image at alisinabh/paperify. More details below.

Usage

Backup

Creates FILE-qr directory with generated QR codes and a PDF file (if possible) inside. Then you can print those files and keep them. If you want to increase the error correction level use option -L (default, low error correction level, 2953 bytes per page, 7 % can be restored), -M (2331 bytes per page, 15 % can be restored), -Q (1663 bytes per page, 25 % of data can be restored), or -H (highest error correction level, 1273 bytes per page, 30% of data can be restored).

./paperify.sh [options] FILE

Example

• Set TOOL_PATH, where the script code is:

TOOL_PATH=`pwd`

• Create a test directory:

mkdir /tmp/test
cd /tmp/test

• Create a test file with random input:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=test.dat bs=1024 count=10

• Create a paper backup in PDF format:

$TOOL_PATH/paperify.sh test.dat

• Print PDF output file test.dat.pdf.

Restore

• Scan your pages. If you use SANE tools with a flatbed scanner, you can use the script scanimages.sh which scans page by page.

• If you have a scanner with automatic page feeder, your scan result is likely a PDF file. You then split your PDF file into single pages:

$TOOL_PATH/splitpdf.sh test.dat.pdf

Afterwards, use digitalify.sh to parse QR codes in all image files from DIRECTORY and to reconstruct chunks into OUTPUT_FILE. Make sure input file names are correct.

$TOOL_PATH/digitalify.sh test.dat.recovered test.dat.pdf.splitted_pages

Finally, verify the SHA-1 sum:

sha1sum test.dat.recovered

Use with Docker

You can mount your files at /target in paperify's docker container. Then run paperify.

For simplicity, You can just copy the bellow commands which will mount your current directory automatically.

# To Paperify
# FIRST: cd into the folder that your file is in
docker run -v$(pwd):/target alisinabh/paperify FILE

# To Digitallify
# First cd into the folder that your scanned images are in
docker run -v$(pwd):/target --entrypoint=/paperify/digitallify.sh alisinabh/paperify OUTPUT_FILE .

Recommendations

Multiple files

Use tarballs and gzip to store and compress your data.

tar cvfz files.tgz file1.txt file2.txt

Encryption

To protect your data you can encrypt them using gpg (GnuPG).

gpg --symmetric file.txt

Then use file.txt.gpg in paperify.

License

Peperify is licensed in GPL-3.0

Read more in LICESE