I set up /--.pdf to start with. I find that for my yearly document amount, there is no value in adding more than one level of hierarchy. File browser search tools are easier than more hierarchy for the last bit.

I think I will switch my default path to be <correspondent>/filename.pdf (with filename as above). I think organizing by correspondent will give a more meaningful sorting for "manual" access than sorting by year.

For files which are strongly tied to a date, as documents in Paperless pretty much always are, I like to have a YYYY-MM-DD (ISO-8601) format date as the first element. This gives a nice chronological sorting.

I use {correspondent}/{created_year}/{created_year}.{created_month}.{created_day} - {title} as my default storage path to achieve exactly that since I mount a CIFS volume I use on my Windows clients as well into paperless-ngx, this makes it easy to also access the PDF’s via any client and not just the paperless-ngx web UI.

Thanks, everyone.

I ended up going with {correspondent}/{created_year}/{created_year}.{created_month}.{created_day} - {title}

For those who Google, if you have already loaded in documents and would like to make the corresponding changes to follow the above structure, you'll have to run this:

sudo docker exec -it Paperless-NGX document_renamer

For the record, this worked with Container Manager within a Synology NAS.