If you haven’t given some serious thought to getting rid of most of the documents then consider it. There is very little need to keep most routine documents for more than a few years. If you think you need your electric bill for March 2006 at your fingertips, why?
I was hoping someone would make this point. A lot of digital archiving is just delaying tossing things - a hard drive is easier to deal with than boxes of paper. The contents can still be useless.
When it comes to a search solution - what kind of searches have you done in the past? What kind of problems did you come across? If the answer to either is "none" you are planning on building a useless system.
You never know when you will need a 10 year old doc. Audits and disputes for example. In addition I suspect keeping all the docs uses 1% of the spaces of photos people back up anyway.
I agree that search is overkill - just drudge manually or use grep when the time comes to dig.
