Hot Stuff
CreativePro.com Podcast
Don't miss it! Updated every Monday.
Win Art Parts CD-RON 7 & Web Parts!
1 winner selected
The Big Picture Magazine - FREE
Real-world solutions to design challenges
Comments
Login
Login to post a comment. Not a member? Sign up here
Forgot your password?
Cleaning up the clutter
I recently had to disassemble my office in order to have an additional set of power outlets. Besides, my two UPS' were near each other and the wiring tangle was both a visual and electrical mess. Picture the snake scene from Indiana Jones and you are there. I am not a clean freak like my better half, Lynette Kent, and while I'm not dirty, I am one of those people who "place it here or there" and finding that item is sometimes a real time waster. Earlier this year we met with Fujitsu and they showed us their new ScanSnap and it really was fantastic. THey showed it to us over dinner at the restaurant we were eating at. The fun part was when they scanned various sized receipts and they came out on the screen sized the same as the document going in. The really great part was the business card reader. It's one of those "you gotta see it to believe it" scenes. Words cannot do it justice. I'm still amazed. Fast forward to today.
My "new" desk is clean and that stack of business cards is now in my address book. Those receipts are not in their own stack for taxes. Their also in the taxes folder waiting for January filing. Start with the little 300 and amaze your friends. You WILL buy the 500 to whittle down that stack waiting to be filed. I like being neat and orderly. Lynette is also amazed as much as I am. Rick Redfern
The pitfall of this concept...
Lest you get complacent about your paperwork, the drawback to scanning documents and saving to CD is that they are a lousy archival media. Much like a thermal fax that starts out black and slowly fades to a blank page, I know that CDs I burned that are more than 5 years old are in danger of losing data, and older ones have become unreadable. This is not good news to people who put their business data onto CDs for permanent storage.
At this point, hard disk drives are still the safest long-term storage media because they are well protected and a standard format (unlike ZIP, Bornoulli and other removable types) and do not deteriorate like optical media.
If you do decide to archive to CDs (or DVD for that matter) you must then add the burden of testing and duplicating every single disk to new media every few years to avoid lost data. That's not much of a trade-off for storing boxes of messy, but permanent, paper copies.
Timely Advice
David and I are sympatico on some level--I've just been looking for a document-feed scanner myself. And though I'm not a big fan of all-in-one devices, I must admit a couple of the units that scan, fax, copy and print are looking somewhat attractive. Some (though not all) of these do multi-page scanning, though I am sure at a much slower speed than the dedicated models.
The problem I see with some of these, and something everyone should look out for, is the "twistyness" of the paper path. some of the all-in-one machines try to save on space by putting the original document through some twists and turns that would make a BMW nervous. I cringe to think what would happen to some of the tattered originals I, like David, have been piling up for many years.
Thanks David. Now if someone would just make a scanner that would take all my old record-albums and auto-scan those, then we'd have something!