The paper free home
Papers has in many years been caused me frustration, they keep coming in and even the best intentions to keep them organized has ended out in complete chaos for me. I always have had trouble finding the papers when i need them and it has actually over the years cost me a great deal of money.
Since around mid 90′es i have had the idea to scan all my papers and though out the originals, but at the time it was not possbile for due to the hard drive space needed and that type of scanners was also pretty expensive. Today hard drives has become very cheap and scanners with sheet feeders can be found as low as 199$, so about a year ago I started the scanning process of all papers in the house old and new.
There is a few things to consider before starting a project like that
Scanner hardware
I had thousands of documents and scanning them on a flatbed scanner was out of the question, I started out by buying a Brother 5840CN multi function printer that had a 30 pages sheet feeder. I actually scanned most of my documents on that scanner, but I did have a few problems. The Brother 5844CN scanner drivers was not that well written, they had a habit of crashing every 4-5 scan so the sheet feeder stopped and you had to sort out the paper jam that it caused. The network drivers were the worst so I switched to the USB driver versions that were a bit better but far from perfect.
I ended up buying a Canon DR 2050C this is a real document scanner build for scanning documents and i does that very well, it have a few things build that makes it really great for document scanning, first of all it scanners both pages at the same time and that makes it really fast when you have a lot of documents. The Canon DR 2050 also has a build in function in the driver that automatically though out the backside if it is empty, so scanning is as simple as bushing a button on the scanner no matter if it is one sided or two sided. The Canon DR 2050 was a bit on the expensive side but at the ending I had a lot of trouble with my Brother 5844c that was ready for anything.
Backup
Securing the electronic documents with a good backup is very impotent as well, from now one I will only have my documents digital so if I lost them in hard drive crash, my computer got stolen or a fire it would not be possible to get them back. I use Idrive for backup they are pretty cheap and a backup tool is included that automate the process for me.
Organizing digital documents
I store all my digital documents in PDF format on my Synology NAS. PDF is a widely used format for storing documents digitally and Adobe Acrobat standard can automatically run a OCR on my documents so they can be indexed and there by much easier to search. A have made a directory structure on my NAS so it is easy to find my documents even though they are indexed and can search them at anytime, I found it easier to find them manually.
The goal has been reached
Every paper in my house is now scanned, of cause there is a few documents you can’t though out but they are scanned and the few documents i need to keep in the original paper form has been put away. I have gone from around 10.000 paper documents to around 21 pages. I bet i can find every document within 30 seconds not matter if i am at home in front of my desktop or I am standing in the middle of nowhere with my net book as long as a 3G internet connection.
All my old paper documents has been shredded before i though them out to prevent identity theft, some may think that is over kill but I sleep well at night knowing that nobody can go though my private documents, there is just a small point, keep the documents in the paper form until it has been backed up that way you won’t lose any.
Tags: document, paper, paper free, scanner
