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Paperless Home — 6 Comments

  1. Can you post a follow-up, because I’d like to know:
    – Are you still satisfied with your solution (hardware/software)?
    – Did you switch to other software/hardware and what are your experiences?
    – Did you met your other goals in the mean-time?
    – Are you keeping all your hard-copies or are you trowing them out (I’m referring to any legal issues when you supply a printed copy of, for example, a warranty claim)?

    I’m very eager to hear your experiences.

    Greetings,

    Jeffrey

    • – Still using the same Hardware/SW.
      – Like the Fujitsu scanner but it would be easier to have a device that is connected through ethernet/wifi. Those scanners are $$$ so not an option.
      – I’m keeping the hardcopies but I don’t have to worry about how and where to store them. Everything arriving in 2012 goes into a box called…. “2012”. No more sorting or organizing.
      – It is difficult to consistently scan all incoming documents directly, so I stack them and once per month I scan them and process them.

  2. Thanks for your great article. Makes decisions a lot easier!

    > NOT: auto-tagging based on content is not possible

    For this there is a little workaround:
    You can mark some text on the paper with a textmarker which are set as tags to the PDF from the ScanSnap software.
    If you don’t pass the file automaticly but use the “Scan to folder”-function and after that use the “Import” from DevonThink then the tags generated from the marked text are set to the pdf as “keyword” in DT. After that you can use the DT script “Convert keywords to tags” and – voilà – you have the marked text as tag.
    Sounds more difficult than it is in real life… :-)

    > it would be easier to have a device that is connected through ethernet/wifi

    This could be done with the Belkin F5L009 USB-Ethernet-Hub (cheap on eBay)

    Some links:

    https://www.documentsnap.com/using-a-scansnap-with-a-network-usb-hub-your-experience/

    Bye…

  3. DevonThink would be my choice also if on a Mac. I’m very surprised that they don’t expand to PC – it would seem in the best interest of a file organizer to be multiplatform.

    Anyway, Benubird did sound interesting but it’s discontinued and I’m not sure about the WAF or how easy it would be to sync across systems. Evernote is great if your the kind of person who likes to walk around naked with your social security # tattooed to your chest, but personally I like my data to have a bit more security than that. I haven’t bought my scanner yet (I’m not sure the time is really right / the right software exists yet), I want a plan with a very high WAF that can be synced across multiple computers. I’m looking at tagspaces (tagspaces.com) as an option. Have you (or anyone here) tried / considered this? It has a lot of growing up to do still, but the project seems alive and still perhaps better than other options I’ve seen so far.

    As an aside, I’m curious why you desired a wireless option? This has not been a criteria in my search since it seems a USB3 connection would be faster / less of a headache. The files will all be shared with sync software anyway. Am I missing something about the allure of the wireless option?

    • Wifi: because I wanted to put the scanner in a closet in the living room, without any computers nearby. Pull out the scanner, feed the paper and magic would happen somewhere in the network.
      Currently: I don’t care about the wifi anymore. I scan my papers about once per month and that appears to be enough.
      Speed? USB2 or USB3 doesn’t make a difference because at the end, processing the scanned documents, that’s what’s taking the time (OCR process)
      Tagspaces: Took a quick look and it seems like this is more about handling files and organising them.

      What I like about devonthink is that all scanned documents in the inbox can be placed in the right folder with a single click. Why? Because Devonthink recognises the document/content and suggest “should I put this in the ‘car-insurance-folder’?” and I only have to confirm.