One decision that I made and have never (yet) regretted was going to electronic format for as much of my documentation as possible. As part of this I invested in a Fujitsu Scansnap S1300 - it is on Amazon for $249 but I found it for < $200 last Fall. I would not say it is portable on a day to day basis, except in a pinch - it wil drop into my laptop bag if I pack carefully - but as a weekly commuter it fits in easily. My experience is that it works as advertised - plug it in and scan away. It has handled two side receipts, multiple sizes, slight scrunched up from my wallet etc with ease. Combined with drop box storage, and a good separate backup plan, I feel safe that I won't lose the files and have never looked back. Gone are the days of filing and storing all those small paper receipts that go to make up a years worth of accounting. I'd love to hear anyone else's experience with automatic backup plans & cloud storage - those are the next goals for me.
I have a mini-cloud at home over my router's network, and every boot triggers an automatic mirroring of the Truecrypt file which holds all my documents to a hard disk sitting inside a safe in the garage and 2 other computers in the house. It is not an ideal way of keeping things synchronised if you are using multiple computers, but it certainly feels safe, is very cheap, and avoids sending 5 GB of data over my ADSL connection every day.
I've been looking at one of these lately and would be interested to hear opinion on any other products, or do the few people that use these type of devices all use the Scansnap?
I have one of the pen type scanners, its an oversized pen, I manually run it over each page, it stores a couple hundred pages on an 8GB microsd card. Plug it into the computer and ... I keep that with me when I travel and such. Then at home I have a Xerox Documate 152. Its a great scanner. Has an ADF that holds at least 50 pages, and scans both sides of the page in one pass. It also has one button scanning, so when I get mail, I open it up, pop it in the scanner, hit the scan button, then shred it. Open the next piece... Being as paperless as possible is not only a major time savor for me, it is essential to staying organized. I travel too often to have only copies of important documents sitting at home. I store all my documents on my macbook air, using encfs. When i'm at home, the volume is shared over my home network so that I can access my documents and such from any machine at home. For backup I'm currently testing out 2 strategies: 1) CrashPlan: This is a great idea, however the software is a resource hog. I use crashplan to backup the raw encrypted files from my air to 3 or 4 other machines (1 at home, 2 friends, 1 at a datacenter). + Free for p2p backup. - Since I backup to 4 destinations, I have to upload my encrypted raw files to 4 destinations. While over my 100mbit @ home, this isn't a problem, but when syncing over my blackberry while abroad, its not plausible. 2) Wuala: This is another great idea. This is p2p backup software. Your data is split up into small chunks, encrypted, and sent to multiple other users. This is free software. + Free. + Unlimited 'Cloud' Storage. + Cross Platform. + File only uploaded once, then distributed between peers to multiple peers within the cloud automatically. - Slow at times.
Have you got a link to this? Interested in seeing how that works? Does it not become tedious to scan papers with something so small, or is it a really oversized pen?
It does become tedious. But during my travels I rarely have any heavy duty scanning, that is mainly at home.
Here is a more featured, expensive, and later version than mine: http://www.amazon.com/DocuPen-X05-B...4UNM/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1298374189&sr=8-2 My version is available for around $100 http://www.amazon.com/Planon-Docupe...5QXW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1298374189&sr=8-1
Thanks for the links. It does look quite compact, but my vision was to do slightly more frequent scanning on the road. In the office we've got these new big scanners that automatically send the scanned images to our emails. That's a pretty handy system, though it does still mean I have to be in one of our offices. I suppose I've got to balance the ease of transport with the ease of use between something like the Scansnap and the Docupen
I've got a RoadWarrior portable scanner which I always have with me. It's light, fast and small, but I'm not good at keeping up with receipts and things when I'm on the road. As for data protection, I have a 3 TB RAID file server on my network and I'm reasonably disciplined about keeping all important documents and data on it. The file server does a nightly backup of critical data via VPN to a thin client in my office that has a 750 GB hard drive attached, so I've got off-site storage of the important stuff. The files in the photograph and video directory are too big for VPN off-site storage, so I have a separate 1 TB drive on the file server that mirrors them.
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