Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

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Recently, Om Malik wrote a post called The Ugly Truth About Broadband: Upload Speeds.

The article is about slow upload speeds in general – you can have the fastest download speeds in the world, but for many tasks that involve uploading, even our broadband is excruciatingly slow.

One of the things Om wanted to do was sync up his music collection using DropBox and backup his whole computer using Mozy.

It’s been about four days since I set everything up, and the results are dismal. Only 1 percent of my hard drive is backed up and less than 15 percent of my music has been uploaded.

The slowness of uploading to online backup services is something that is not really talked about a lot, but it is an issue at least initially.

More interesting to me are the comments on that post. In particular, people have come up with strategies to deal with the time it takes to upload everything.

When I first started with Mozy, I didn’t back-up my whole drive at once. I started with the most critical folders, and added a new one to the upload every day until it was all up. Then after almost all of it was up, I finally set it to back-up everything. Not a big issue

Personally, I just let it run and back up everything for a number of days, but I probably should have done something like that.

If you use online backup, did you just do the whole thing at once? Or did you do a hack like that commenter? Any good online backup tips? Leave them in the comments!

I have received a number of questions recently about the software that is included with the Fujitsu ScanSnap. For example, why does the ScanSnap come with both Abbyy FineReader and Adobe Acrobat? Aren’t they both for doing OCR?

I suspect part of the reason that this question comes up is because of my posts about my ScanSnap workflow and my Adobe Acrobat OCR Applescript. Is all that necessary?

Let me start by saying that I personally have the ScanSnap S300M. The S300M comes neither with Abbyy FineReader not with Adobe Acrobat. If you have the S1500 or S1500M, your scanner will come with both and doing OCR is much more integrated than with the S300M, so my post-scan processing fun may not be necessary.

So What’s The Difference?

The ScanSnap comes with a special version of Abbyy FineReader called FineReader for ScanSnap. They’ve integrated that with ScanSnap Organizer, so if you are using the built-in automatic OCR’ing, that is what it is using.

If all you care about is having your PDFs searchable and don’t mind performing the OCR right after scanning, then the supplied FineReader is probably all you need.

To my mind, there are basically two main reasons why you will want to use Adobe Acrobat:

• You want to do PDF editing after the fact
• You want to batch your OCR after the fact

PDF Editing

So you have your scanned PDF. Now what? If you want to remove/rearrange pages and do a whole ton of other editing functions, Acrobat is a great tool. It is most definitely not just for making a PDF searchable.

You can see a bunch more information for Adobe Acrobat 9 (included with the ScanSnap 1500) and Acrobat 8 (included with the ScanSnap 1500M). You can see from the price that it’s a pretty good deal that this software is included with the ScanSnap.

Batch OCR

If you have a whole bunch of documents to scan in, it may be annoying to scan, sit there and wait for it to OCR, scan, OCR, scan, OCR, and so on. Some people prefer to scan all their documents to PDF in one shot, and then OCR them all at once. You can use Acrobat to do that instead of the included FineReader.

So there you have it, some of the differences between the two. What are some of the reasons you use one over the other?

Yesterday I was in the middle of a scan-a-thon and hit a snag.

I was scanning a receipt for my new sofa (this one, if you are interested), and ScanSnap Manager didn’t like it one little bit. It said “Incorrect Paper Size”. All I could guess was that the receipt was just too long.

I hit Google and couldn’t find much to help me out. I scanned another receipt that was the same width but a bit shorter, and it had no problem at all.

I then thought “OK, if it can’t figure out the size of the receipt, I’ll set it manually”, so I went into ScanSnap Manager and tried to set a custom size to the length and width of the receipt – no dice. ScanSnap Manager didn’t even let me put in the length. It was too long even for that.

The solution I came up with was to fold the receipt in half and then scan it as a double-sided page. It worked out fairly well.. the PDF was in 2 pages instead of 1, but at least I could scan it.

I have no idea if this is a limitation of the ScanSnap or of PDF, but if you run into a similar situation, maybe this will help you out.

Photo by iwantanimac

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I am generally a Mac user. I do have access to borrow a Windows ScanSnap, but my personal ScanSnap is a S300M.

One thing I get asked quite a bit is which software should someone use to manage their PDFs? The ScanSnap comes with ScanSnap Organizer and a trial of Rack2-Filer, but what is the best?

The Mac of course has Devonthink, Yep, and others, but what abut Windows?

Since I don’t personally use Windows for my PDF management, I thought I’d open it up to you. What do you use to manage your documents? Do you use OneNote? Evernote? Your own personal folder structure?

Weigh in and leave a comment and let us all know what you use and why.

Recently I came across this tweet from Ross L. Kodner and he brought up a good point – one of the benefits of an online backup is having your data safe and sound.

If you live in a city that is prone to earthquakes, hurricanes, etc., it kind of defeats the purpose to have your online backup residing in the same city as you.

To that end, I have put this list together of where common online backup vendors have their data centers. Not surprisingly, none of them were willing to give this information on request so this is mainly pieced together from some Google-fu. Therefore, I can’t 100% say for sure that it is accurate, but you get the general idea.

Here is the list:

Mozy

• Salt Lake City
• Dublin
• (likely other EMC data centers)

Carbonite

• Boston
• Beijing

Jungle Disk (S3)/Dropbox
Jungle Disk and Dropbox both use Amazon’s S3 service. While Amazon generally does not disclose where their data centers are, the following are the edge locations for CloudFront, their CDN, so it stands to reason that S3 data is stored there too.
United States

• Ashburn, VA
• Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• Miami, FL
• Newark, NJ
• Palo Alto, CA
• Seattle, WA
• St. Louis, MO

Europe

• Amsterdam
• Frankfurt
• Dublin
• London

Asia

• Hong Kong
• Tokyo

Jungle Disk (Rackspace)
Since Jungle Disk was acquired by Rackspace, they have started offering storage in Rackspace’s data center too.

• Grapevine, TX
• London
• Hong Kong

SpiderOak

• Chicago

Like I said, this list is likely incomplete. If you have any additions or modifications, leave a comment below.

Where is your data?

Just thought I’d post about something a little different today. One blog I really like (no surprise) is Unclutterer.com. There is a great range of posts on a lot of different topics.

A few recently caught my eye:

Could your productivity benefit from a professional nagger? talks about one situation where nagging is a good thing: when a pro does it! We all know how bad procrastination can be, and we all do it. What if you could have a neutral third party step in and give you the push we all need from time to time.

I honestly can’t say I have ever heard of nagger as a profession (though I can think of a few people that would excel at it…).

Ask Unclutterer: What should I do with old journals? polls the crowd about that old stack of journals or diaries that is taking up space in a box or at the back of your closet. Keep or trash?

Both are interesting posts that I had never thought too much about before. How about you? Would you ever hire a professional nagger? Do you hang on to your old journals or did you have a diary-burning party? Let us know in the comments.

Just came across this video that was posted by Michael Sidejas, the Product Marketing Manager for the ScanSnap at Fujitsu.

He gives a good demonstration of all the features (new and otherwise) of the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 and its bundled software.

I like it when companies use video like this so thanks Michael.