Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

One issue with the Fujitsu ScanSnap and OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard that I forgot to mention the other day is the ABBYY FineReader that comes bundled with it.

When scanning with the version of Finereader that ships with the ScanSnap S510M and S1500M, you may get an error message like “File not created with ScanSnap”.

This is a known issue and according to this bulletin from Fujitsu Support, it will be fixed “within 2009″.

Fujitsu has assured me that they’re working on it, so hopefully we’re not talking December 31 here!

I personally do not use FineReader.. anyone have any workarounds for the Snow Leopard issue that they use? Leave a note in the comments.

Update: Thanks to reader Spike in the comments for the tip, ABBYY has released a version of FineReader Express Edition that supports Snow Leopard. More info here.

Update #2 Nov 19/09: The ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap Snow Leopard Update is now available.

Update Nov 13, 2009: The Snow Leopard fix has been released. See this for more information!

Since Apple’s new version of OSX – 10.6 aka Snow Leopard is released today, I thought I’d make this post so that we can share our experience using the Fujitsu ScanSnap with it.

I haven’t found any indication that 10.6 is officially supported by Fujitsu yet, but I have seen mixed reviews online.

Update: Fujitsu has reached out to me and also posted on Twitter via their @ScanSnapIT account the status of Snow Leopard support. For ScanSnap S300M, S500M, S510M, and S1500, scanning is supported on Snow Leopard, but Quick Menu does not work and Scan to Folder currently does not work.

Fujitsu Customer Support has posted this bulletin listing the workarounds and support status. They expect it to be fixed “within 2009″.

This tweet by user @tedlandau makes it look like Snow Leopard is working with the ScanSnap:

However, I also came across this ars technica forum thread saying that at least one user has had problems scanning to PDF using the ScanSnap S510M.

I haven’t tried Snow Leopard myself yet and haven’t heard back from Fujitsu regarding their support for it, but have you had any experiences one way or the other with it? Leave your feedback in the comments.

Update: Just came across another tweet from user @TaxMan45 saying that he chatted with Fujitsu Support and that the ScanSnap 510M is compatible with Snow Leopard, but not in Quick Menu mode.

Update: There is an update from Fujitsu that the Snow Leopard fix will be ready at the end of November.

As we all know, one issue with doing online backup is if you have a huge amount of data to upload or download, it can take a lonnnnnnnnng time to upload or download.

Amazon has a clever solution to take care of this problem for you. You can ship them a hard drive and have the data loaded into S3.

How it works is that you put your data on a compatible storage device, then you email them. They’ll email you back with a unique identifier that you put on the device. Once you get that, you ship the device off to them. They’ll load the data and ship it back.

This makes a lot of sense if you are someone who has a ton of data to upload for the first time, has to do extremely large backups, or has a DR situation and can’t wait days and days to download your backup.

How Much Does It Cost?

Obviously this is not free. Amazon charges $80 per device, and $2.49 per data loading hour.

Because of this cost, you obviously have to have a certain amount of data to make it worth it. To that end, Amazon has an Import/Export Calculator to compare the cost of using the service vs. just uploading it.

If you had a large amount of data would you use this? Do you think other online backup providers are going to start offering this? (If they don’t already).

So I was about to do a post about how Earth Class Mail has changed their pricing plans, but I then realized that I had never actually written about this service before. I’ll have to remedy that right now!

What Is It?

You can think of Earth Class Mail like an online post-office box. Instead of giving out your address, you give them your special PO Box. When mail gets sent to that PO Box, Earth Class Mail will do one of a number of things with it, and you can then access it all online.

As you can guess, this is awesome for people who travel or who want to have a “virtual address”.

How Does It Work?

This graphic I ripped off from their site explains it well:

Sounds Good But I Don’t Want A PO Box

PO Boxes do have some limitations. FedEx & UPS won’t deliver to them, you can’t use it to register a company, and in general a street address just looks “better”.

Instead of having a PO Box, you can choose to have an actual street address in the following cities:

• New York City, NY
• Los Angeles, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Portland, OR
• Bern, Switzerland
• Geneva, Switzerland
• Zurich, Switzerland
• Dietzenbach, Germany

How Much Does It Cost?

Earth Class Mail uses a monthly pricing plan that goes from from $19.95/mo to $59.95/mo depending on the amount of mail, number of recipients, etc.

If you want a street address instead of a PO Box, it ranges from Free (if you use the Portland address) up to $29.95/mo if you want a NYC one.

I can see big benefits of using Earth Class Mail if you travel or even if you don’t want the hassle of dealing with paper mail at all. Have you ever used their service? How do you like it?

Like many of you I am sure, I use Google Reader to read my RSS feeds. Sometimes when I come across articles that I want to save into my Evernote account, I’d click on the article to open it in a tab, then hit the Evernote clipper button, and so on.

No more. Evernote has come out with a blog post that has a killer tip (to me anyways) for sending the article that you are reading straight into Evernote.

I bring this up not only because it’s cool, but I imagine this tip works with a lot of web apps, not just this one.

To quote Andrew Sinkov:

Why I love this feature

A lot of my web life can be broadly classified as research: recipes, drool-worthy gadgets, lifehacking ideas, articles to read, etc. Much of that stuff enter my consciousness through Google Reader. The usual workflow is something like–see an interesting post, go to the blog, clip it into Evernote for later, return to Reader. Now, I can do everything without leaving Reader. Awesome.

Agreed.

One company that I have been meaning to write about for quite some time is SpiderOak, which is an online backup and sync provider I have been hearing a lot of good things about.

Cross Platform

While other online backup providers have been Windows-only until just recently, SpiderOak has been cross platform right from the start. They have clients for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware).

In addition, they provide remote access over the web so you can get at your files from any web device.

What is ‘Zero Knowledge?’

It goes without saying (or does it) that an online backup company needs to have security in mind.

SpiderOak takes this to the next level by having a zero-knowledge policy. What does this mean? Aside from strong encryption, which they have, the company never stores or sees your password or encryption keys.

One of their FAQs is “could you read a user’s data if forced at gunpoint?” and the answer (they say) is no.

This is a big benefit if you are concerned about privacy of online backups, but of course it does have one downside. If you forget your password, you are completely and totally on your own. The company can’t help you, because they don’t know your password in the first place. (You can set a password hint, so I strongly recommend setting a good one!).

Not just backup

SpiderOak doesn’t limit itself to just online backup. They are in the sync-ing game too. If you are familiar with Dropbox, it is the same sort of deal. You can sync files across multiple machines automatically, and do it cross-platform between Mac, Windows, and Linux as well.

Pricing

The pricing is tiered. The first 2 Gigs are free, which is great if you don’t have too much to store. After that, pricing is in 100 Gig increments. It’s $10/month for the first 100 GB, and then $10/month additional for each 100 GB on top of that.

They have yearly discounts so if you buy a full year, it is $100.

Sync-ing wise, SpiderOak is cheaper than DropBox which is also free up to 2GB, but then $9.99/month for 50 GB and $19.99/month for 100 GB.

Geeks Make The World Go Around

One thing I like about SpiderOak is that you get the sense that it is run by people who really care about making good software and giving back to the software community. It sounds cheesy, but I love the fact that they have an “Engineering Matters” section of their website that describes what is going on in techie terms, and that they give back tools and code to the open source community.

If you are looking for online backup or syncing software, you definitely want to make sure SpiderOak is one of the ones you look at.

Tad over at Paper Jammed has written a really great piece called Keeping Your Documents Readable For Years To Come.

In it, he doesn’t just state that PDF is the best choice for document archiving, but he goes through the history and the reasons for it.

What if you had to show someone this document five years down the road? Do you want to have to chase down a possibly obsolete version of a very expensive application that might not even run on your operating system?

Any articles that references working on VAX and VMS gets a gold star from me.

It’s hard to imagine, but do you keep your long term documents in another format than PDF?

According to the Mozy blog, the online backup company has just updated their Mac client.

The biggest functionality that they have added is the ability to exclude types of files from your backup. Seems like pretty critical functionality for a backup client but hey, who am I to judge?

Here’s a list of the enhancements in the 1.4 Mac client:

• Improved overall performance and stability for file selections and backups
• Added menu option to automate the collection of log files
• Moved preferences to global System Preferences
• Improved sorting for Files and Folders in Configuration window
• Improved the behavior of saving and canceling in Configuration window
• Added a new icon to indicate partially backed up folders in Configuration window
• Added menu item to start a backup from Configuration window
• Added ability to create Backup Sets to exclude files
• Added ability to sort by column in the Backup Set Editor window
• Updated online guides
• Added menu item to send product feedback or suggestions
• Improved appearance of menu bar icons and other graphics
• Improved speed of file preparation
• Added ability to use the escape (ESC) key to close the Configuration window

Has anyone upgraded to the new client yet? Any issues?

This one is for the Mac users out there. Anyone who has used Mac OSX, whether they know it or not, has probably used Preview (or as Mac-heads call it, Preview.app) at some point. Any time you double click on an image or PDF, it is probably Preview that is starting up to view it.

What a lot of people don’t know is that Preview has some basic document editing capabilities. I made this quick video to run through them:

One thing I forgot to mention when creating the video is that you can use Preview to annotate documents as well. To do this:

• Go to Tools -> Annotate -> Add Note

• Place the annotation where you want it to go
• In the box, type your message

To summarize, Preview.app can:

• Re-order pages
• Delete pages
• Insert pages
• View one or two pages at a time, alone or continuously
• Go to full-screen mode
• View an index sheet of all pages
• Add notes to annotate a document

Do you have any more document management tips for Preview.app? Leave them in the comments.

Over at Fujitsu’s ScanSnap Community site, they have a helpful tutorial that walks you through how to create a scanned version of your signature for use in emails, documents, etc.

First, sign a blank page. Then scan the page and save it to a JPEG (if you want more info on how to do this, see the how-to on scanning to a JPEG). You will need to change the ScanSnap setting to “Color” scanning and then click the “File Option” tab to save as a JPEG. You may also need to scan at a higher resolution, which in ScanSnap terms means choosing the “Best” field under the “Scanning” tab and “Image Quality” section.

I recommend checking the post out, and also they have a helpful link to how to take it one step further and create a self-signed digital ID.

Electronic Signatures Made Simple! – scansnapcommunity.com

Do you use electronic signatures at all?