Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

This video on copying files to Dropbox in Windows 7 is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

There are two things that you need to know about this video:

1. The tip itself is completely ripped off from this CNET article by Ed Rhee
2. It could really apply to SugarSync, not just Dropbox, or any other folder on your computer.

If you have a Windows folder that you are constantly copying documents to, you can add it to your Send To menu for quick right-click access. This video shows you how.

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

(Photo by mikes rite)

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This video on file synchronization is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

You’ve probably heard of sync software like Dropbox or SugarSync, but might not be sure how they work or what exactly they can do for you.

Hopefully, this video will help. I go through some scenarios where sync can help you go paperless, and some things to watch out for.

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

(Photo by eggy_)

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I came across this tip thanks to last week’s Dropbox security debacle. I believe I picked it up from John Gruber.

I have used Dropbox for a long time, but have somehow missed this feature. In the web interface, you can see a log of all changes that have been made to files in your Dropbox account.

To access it, either click here and log in with your Dropbox credentials, or go to the web interface and click on the Events tab.

Once there, you can see a log of all the changes that have been made to the files in your Dropbox account.

As you can see, this morning I have been writing this post (how meta) and last night I updated my shopping list and did an exercise from Zed Shaw’s Learn Python The Hard Way.

You can either go back page by page, or jump to a specific date if you want to check something out (for example, someone logging into your account sans password).

Dropbox security concerns aside, I wish more cloud applications would provide this change-by-change level of audit. Great feature.

(Photo by Siri Hardeland)

File syncing services such as Dropbox or SugarSync are amazing. You create or edit a file on one computer, and behind the scenes the changes are reflected on your other computers.

If you are a QuickBooks user, it may be tempting to use one of these file syncing services. After all, wouldn’t it be great to be able to put your QBW file in your Dropbox folder on your desktop computer and then have it synced to your laptop?

Via LinkedIn, I came across this thorough article by Michelle Long, CPA that warns against it.

You can use Dropbox, SugarSync, Box.net or other file sharing services to share a QuickBooks backup or portable file with clients or others. However, please do not put the QuickBooks working company file (QBW) or Quicken file in these folders.

There are lots of links in the article to examples of problems that come up, and quotes from other experts. I did some Googling around, and I couldn’t find many examples of people saying they are syncing successfully. It seems like there is a real risk of corruption.

I’d be interested in hearing from people who are currently syncing their QuickBooks data. Anyone have any success or horror stories?

Three weeks ago, I wrote a tip in the DocumentSnap newsletter recommending that if you are going to be using cloud backup or syncing services, it is worth being aware of any security implications this might have and what your options are with respect to encryption.

It turns out that my timing was impeccable, because over the past week there has been a brouhaha about some changes that Dropbox made to their terms of services and the security implications this may have.

The Issue

Business Insider noted that Dropbox recently changed their terms of service to say that if the United States government requests it, they will comply with US law and decrypt a user’s files.

This is fairly standard stuff, and most (but not all, I am coming to that soon) cloud services have a similar provision in their TOS. After all, they do have to comply with their country’s laws.

The reason that many people are upset is because, as Miguel de Icaza noted, the wording in a previous Dropbox Help Center article gave the impression that no one at Dropbox had the ability to decrypt user files. Based on the new TOS changes, that clearly is not the case.

Dropbox’s Response

Dropbox quickly responded to the Business Insider piece and Miguel’s post (see the comment by Arash). They also wrote a blog post explaining the situation. I recommend that you give their post a read if you are a Dropbox user.

My Thoughts

Reactions to this seem to be split between the two extremes of “Dropbox lied to us!!! I can’t trust them with my data!!!” and “Duh, of course they can access my files on their own servers. You’re crazy if you think they couldn’t”.

Myself, I have previously worked in a SaaS environment with sensitive financial data, and I tend to lean towards the latter of the two views. It is fairly common from my experience that at least some operational employees have the ability to access data on the servers, which is where technical and policy limitations (with audits) come into play.

That doesn’t excuse their sloppy Help Center article (my guess: the writer of the article thought an engineer meant something that they didn’t), but it seems pretty unlikely to me that it was a deliberate intent to mislead by Dropbox. They’d have too much to lose.

Having said that, when you are going paperless, you by definition will have some sensitive documentation (think bank statements). If you have something that you absolutely positively do not want anyone to ever be able to see, you probably should not be putting it on the Internet.

Things You Can Do

Back in 2009 I wrote a post about SpiderOak’s zero knowledge approach to privacy. As that post and my newsletter article from a few weeks ago outlines, one option if you are concerned about security is to use a provider that encrypts your files before they are sent to to the server. SpiderOak and Wuala are two services that do this.

If your documents are encrypted before uploading, that means no one on the provider’s end can access them. This also means that if the government comes knocking, they can honestly say that they can’t access the files.

If you want to keep using Dropbox but want to make your documents more secure, Dropbox themselves have recommend using something like TrueCrypt to encrypt your documents. There are step-by-step instructions (with videos) for how to do this in the Paperless Document Organization Guide, but otherwise what you do is create the Truecrypt volume in your Dropbox folder, put your documents in that, and then Dropbox will sync it.

Your Thoughts?

What do you think about all this? Has this changed your opinion of using Dropbox? What do you do to keep your documents secure in the cloud?I’ve love to hear in the comments.

(Photo by CarbonNYC)

OK, enough writing about the Paperless Document Organization Guide. It’s time to get geeky again.

Many people think of Dropbox as a way to sync files across your computers and devices, but the service is also a great way to share a file that you can’t or don’t want to send via email.

By the way, this post was 100% inspired by the latest Mac Power Users episode about Dropbox. David and Katie had Eddie Smith from Practically Efficient as a guest, and it is a great show if you want to learn more about using Dropbox (this episode is good for Windows users too).

When you want to share a link to a file in Dropbox with someone, there is the traditional way using the Public folder and a “newer” way using the web interface that you may not be aware of.

Sharing Using The Public Folder

Go into your computer’s Dropbox folder and you will find that there is a folder called Public. This is set up by default by Dropbox and it has special powers.

In Windows Explorer or the Mac Finder, right click on any file in that folder. You’ll see a Dropbox submenu and one of the options will be “Copy Public Link”.

Choose that and then go into an email or text editor and paste it. You’ll see a special Dropbox-created link directly to that file. Any file in your Public folder already has a link created for that.

Before you go crazy throwing things in your Dropbox Public folder, remember what I just said: any file in your Public folder already has a link created. That means that theoretically, any file you put in there could be downloaded by someone other than your intended recipient (unlikely, but possible).

To mitigate that somewhat, Merlin Mann has a post on the lengths he goes to to securely send stuff in Dropbox.

Sharing Using The Web Interface

To be honest, I was not aware of this method of sharing until listening to the aforementioned MPU podcast. However, when I went to try it out it wasn’t working for me. After some digging, here is what I found out.

Around the time of the Dropbox .80 beta, they released a new feature that they call the “New Sharing Model”. Unfortunately, it turns out that they pulled it from the 1.0 release, so you need to take one step before you do this. (Note: You need to have at least Dropbox 1.0 installed for this to work).

• In your web browser, go to https://www.dropbox.com/enable_shmodel to enable the new sharing model
• In the Finder, Windows Explorer, or Dropbox web interface, go to any file that is not in your Public folder
• Right-click on the file and choose Get Shareable Link

• You’ll be taken to a special page that has a link to the file to download

• If you want to un-link a file (for example, once it has been downloaded), go to the Dropbox web interface, click the Sharing tab at the top, and click on the new Linked Items tab at the left

From there, you can see which items you have linked and can remove the ones you no longer want to share

There’s two options for sharing files in Dropbox. Do you have any others? Leave a note in the comments.

A year ago, I wrote a post about how to scan to Google Docs with ScanDrop, a utility released by the folks at OfficeDrop.

There have been a number of changes in that year, so I thought it would be a good time to check out ScanDrop again.

At the time, my primary gripes were:

1. It was Windows only
2. You had to scan to JPG (not really a gripe, but I found it odd)

Both of them have been somewhat addressed, so lets take a closer look.

What Is ScanDrop?

ScanDrop is an application that you install that lets you scan to the cloud. What the heck does that mean exactly?

You scan a document with your scanner, and this application will then take it and upload it to Google Docs, OfficeDrop, Evernote, or you can save it to your hard drive or Dropbox.

Even though services like Google Docs and Evernote are (sort of) competitors to OfficeDrop, it is clever of the company to release a tool that interacts with all of them. As a marketing exercise, better to get the program in as many peoples’ hands as possible and hopefully some of them will convert to OfficeDrop users.

ScanDrop for Windows

ScanDrop started out as a Windows application. You can download it here for free. When you start it up, you are presented with a choice of services to upload your document to.

In the Windows version of ScanDrop you can scan to Evernote, Google Docs, OfficeDrop, or your local disk.

If you are using a TWAIN-compliant scanner (ie, not a ScanSnap), you can hit the scan button in the application, choose your scanner, and then it will scan in your document. Here you can see a scan I have just done in preparation for uploading to Google Docs:

If you have a ScanSnap, they provide an application that should create the appropriate ScanSnap settings for you. It didn’t work for me, but it may be because I am running a ScanSnap S1100 which is not one of the ScanSnaps they list support for.

Not a problem, I just created a ScanSnap Manager profile manually and pointed it to the ScanDrop application on the Applications tab.

Once you have scanned in your document, you can manipulate the pages, crop them, rotate them, and if you have changed your mind, change the cloud storage you want to upload to.

When you’re ready, hit the Upload button and it will be sent. Here is an example of it being uploaded to Evernote. I set the notebook and tags from within ScanDrop.

ScanDrop for Mac

The folks at OfficeDrop have released a version of ScanDrop for the Mac. Unlike its Windows cousin, it is not free. You can get it via the Mac App Store for $1.99 at the time of this writing. Not a bad price if uploading to the cloud is something you will be doing a lot and your scanner’s software does not support it.

Like the Windows version, when you first start up ScanDrop you are asked to choose a cloud location to upload to.

In addition to Evernote, Google Docs, OfficeDrop, and local disk, the Mac version adds an option to scan to Dropbox. From what I can tell, this is exactly like the can to local disk option but just pre-selects your Dropbox folder to scan to.

If you have a TWAIN scanner and hit the scan button, it will bring up an integrated version of Image Capture (as far as I can tell) that Mac users may be familiar with.

From there you can select your scanner, set your scan options, and then scan.

If you have a ScanSnap, you set up a profile in ScanSnap Manager to scan to the ScanDrop application. You can see instructions to do that here. One note about these instructions. In Step 8 they say you need to choose the JPG option on the File Option tab. I was able to select PDF and it worked for me.

Once you’re done, it brings it into ScanDrop where you can manipulate the image and upload it to your cloud provider. You can see here I am preparing to upload to Evernote, and have set my notebook and can set tags.

NOTE: At the time of writing this, ScanDrop for Mac version 1.03 has a bug which prevents uploading to Evernote from working. They do list a workaround, but it didn’t work for me. They say they are working on a fix so as soon as that gets through the Mac App Store hopefully uploading to Evernote will work again.

Once you’ve uploaded, the document will appear as a PDF in the cloud service. Here’s a screenshot of it in Google Docs:

Here is a sample of a ScanDrop-scanned PDF in Google Docs:

What About OCR?

If you are wanting to have your PDF searchable, it is worth noting that ScanDrop itself does not do OCR. It relies on the cloud service to do it. The only exception to this is when you use a ScanSnap to scan to PDF before uploading it. In that case, you can use the ScanSnap’s integrated OCR to OCR the PDF first.

In all other cases, if you are an Evernote Premium or OfficeDrop subscriber, you can upload it to the cloud and they will OCR the PDF for you. If you use Google Docs, you can use their OCR, but it isn’t a very good solution.

If you are using ScanDrop to scan to your local disk, you will need to use some OCR tool afterwards to make the PDF searchable.

Do you scan documents to the cloud? How do you do it? Leave a note in the comments and let us know.

In honor of the fact that I am writing this while at Macworld Expo, I thought I would point out an article from Macworld’s website.

DocumentSnap reader Brooke (a name that doesn’t at all bring back painful childhood taunting memories) pointed out this article: Which online backup service is right for you?.

If you’re thinking of choosing an online backup, it is a pretty good comparison.

If you don’t back up your Mac’s files, then it’s a matter of when—not if—you’ll lose data that’s precious to you. Apple already robbed Mac users of any excuse not to back up regularly with Time Machine. But a single bad power surge, or a true disaster like fire or vicious weather, could render your Time Machine backups worthless.

Fortunately, off-site backup is easier than ever. A slew of Web services offer affordable online backup for your Mac. These services are often simple to use as well: you install software from the service on your computer, and it backs up your files over the Internet. By keeping current copies of your treasured data far away from your home, you can feel far more confident that your files are safe.

The article runs through Backblaze, Mozy, Carbonite, Jungle Disk, Dropbox, and Crashplan. Even though it is a Macworld article, all of those services are cross-platform.

Do you disagree with any of their points, or do you love a service that they didn’t mention? Lets hear about it in the comments.

As many regular DocumentSnap readers know, I love me some Dropbox. It has weaved its way into almost every part of my daily computer use, and I shudder to think what things were like before it existed.

In case you don’t know what Dropbox is, it is a web service/web app/desktop app/mobile app that syncs your files online and across your (or others’) computers and devices.

Most people use it just to have their files synced, (after all, that is the point), but Appstorm has just done a fantastic post: The Ultimate Dropbox Toolkit & Guide. Helpfully, it is laid out in a way that you don’t need to scroll through the whole post to check out the tips you like.

I am working my way through it now. The Hazel stuff looks interesting.

If you’ve implemented any of these tips, let us know in the comments.

(Hat Tip to Shawn Blanc).

Many people know that Dropbox is great for syncing up your files between different computers.

The other day I was thinking about how in the pre-Hootsuite days I used Dropbox to sync my TweetDeck groups between machines, and I thought I’d look into some other creative uses that people have come up with.

Here are some of my favorites:

Lifehacker has two great posts about creative Dropbox uses like:

• Putting an encrypted TrueCrypt volume on Dropbox. If you like the idea of putting things in “the cloud” but are worried about security, this is a great solution. You can have your stuff encrypted before it even goes online.
• Using shared folders to simulate a network drive
• Make a customized start page
• Keep all your documents with you and accessible (even on your mobile device)
• Keeping all your passwords synced
• Run portable applications like Firefox and VLC

The Dropbox fan page on Facebook has a thread called “What do you use Dropbox for?” with some suggestions like:

• Synchronize your IM (MSN, AIM, etc.) chat logs
• Have a security camera save images to Dropbox so they can be viewed from anywhere
• Run a website (!) out of the Dropbox folder

MaximumPC has “How to Hack Your Dropbox“, with some tips, my favorite being to catch laptop thieves using a keylogger and Dropbox.

And finally, lets hear from the source itself. Dropbox has a Tips and Tricks wiki with a bunch of ideas, including:

• Sync your Firefox bookmarks
• Sync a USB Drive
• Keep your passwords in sync
• Print to PDF on your Mac
• Remotely print MS Office docs
• Sync your saved Windows games that save in My Games

That should be enough to get you going. Do you have any other awesome Dropbox tips? Let us know in the comments.