Ease the burn with back-up
The Age
Thursday December 10, 2009
In case of fire, use this strategy, says Garry Barker. ROBERT Black lives and works in bushland on the edge of Melbourne.It is an inspiring environment that provides the calm he needs for his business of designing company logos on his Macintosh.But it is also a tinderbox in summer. He knows that if luck and the winds are against him, he may have to evacuate and his house could be lost.That's his first reason for turning all his documents into PDF digital records he stores on his Mac, backed up to an external portable hard drive he can quickly run with as well as other drives kept off-site. He might lose his house but the insurance documents will be safe and retrievable quickly in digital form. So, too, will the records generated by his business. He can quickly make an insurance claim and bill his clients.His second reason is "it's cool": "I like to keep things that just might, maybe, perhaps, be useful one day," he says. "Storage these days is cheap; about $200 for a one-terabyte external drive ... You can store a big stack of paper in a terabyte."The third reason for scanning stuff into a hard drive, or, as many Macophiles do, sending it to their private iDisk space in Apple's MobileMe cloud, is that it reduces physical filing space and files can be found quickly in a database. An alternative to iDisk is a commercial back-up service, such as Mozy. See mozy.com."I file by subject and date," Mr Black says. "If I must keep paper, say for the Australian Tax Office, I do so in archive boxes in date order." Valuable paper can be stored away from risk but if it burns, you have the record.So, how to do it? Obviously, a scanner is required. But which one? The answer depends on the size of scanning tasks, price, time and your patience.The most common scanners on the market are flat-beds made by companies such as Epson, Canon, Microtek and Hewlett-Packard. They are intended mainly for scanning photos but do a good job with documents, too. Consumer models cost about $230-$500. Most have the optical character reading (OCR) software needed to make copyable and editable PDFs of a document but scan only one side of one page at a time.Some have document feeders slower than true document scanners made by Fujitsu, Canon, Avision and so on.These are faster, scanning about 20 pages a minute; more convenient; and are usually duplex machines that scan both sides of a page at once. They range from $500 to $1500-plus.Mr Black scans his SoHo business material (and pretty much every other bit of sensible paper that comes his way) using a Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M (about $850). Fujitsu also makes a smaller model, the S300M, for less than $500.The ScanSnap scans in monochrome, colour or greyscale and has a fast, capacious document feeder. "I batch-scan, building up a folder of, say, 20 or 30 documents and then scanning them all at once; saves time and effort," Mr Black says. "I always scan in colour, making PDFs in Adobe Acrobat, which handles the OCR."OCR is not a perfect science. It is not 100 per cent accurate and the smaller the text in the original, the worse the accuracy. But you don't correct OCR errors in the PDF €” rather, the idea is that the document can now be found with the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X to search for the name or string of text you need."Spotlight in Snow Leopard (Mac OSX 10.6) is very powerful. Scanners take pictures of documents and Acrobat makes a PDF with an 'invisible' text layer overlaying the picture, which is then searchable by Spotlight."Mr Black also uses an application called DEVONthink Office Pro (tinyurl.com/ypnuw7) to act as a personal assistant.It will file, collate, relate and organise documents straight out of the scanner and generally do all of the intelligent things a lot of us either haven't the smarts to manage or are too lazy to do.
© 2009 The Age
Share This