The short version:
- Get a Doxie One scanner. For (optional) convenience, get an Eye-Fi SD card for $35, which will send documents from the scanner to your computer wirelessly and automatically.
Update: If you want to cut your scanning time by more than half, spend a few bucks more and get the Canon P-215 scanner(as recommended by The Wirecutter). It scans twice as fast, it scans both sides of the page at the same time, it has a document feeder, and it has built-in OCR.
- Scan your documents to your hard drive. Put them all in one big folder. If you want, use the OCR option in Doxie’s software to make your PDFs searchable.
- Date and tag the documents: use this format for filenames:
[year]-[month] name of document #tag1 #tag2 #tag3.pdf
- Get an expanding file jacket
. Put all your important papers in there and out of the way, and scan them all once every quarter or so (I usually do my scans once a year just before I do my taxes).
- Shred the original documents.
- Keep backups.
When you want to run a search, open your archive folder and run a search. Need all tax-related documents for last year? Search for 2012 #taxes
.
No subscriptions. No extra software. Guaranteed to be stay portable and useful for the next 20 years.
Why the hashtags? What about folders?
Using #tags #like #this
in the filename is a universal tagging mechanism. It works on Mac OS and on Windows, and the searches on those systems will have no problem finding your files.
Sticking files in a folder hierarchy is a poor way of filing that is on its way out. For example, what do you do if a document is both medical and tax-related in nature? Do you create a Taxes → Medical
folder structure, or Medical → Taxes
?
Tags allow a document to live in more than one box at a time, are easy to add, and are easy to search for.
Why Not Evernote? Reasons, that’s why.
There have been a couple of great posts by others lately about going paperless, and they’re definitely worth reading. But they all assume you need some kind of fancy software setup, including (most commonly) a subscription plan to Evernote.
I agree it must be nice to have someone else run OCR on my documents and host them for me. But let’s look at the drawbacks:
- I have to pay someone else $60 a year in case I need to perform occasional full-text searches on my own documents.
- Long-term uncertainty. Will Evernote be around in 10 years? 20 years? How do I know I’ll be able to get my massive archive back out again when they go out of business?
- Handing off responsibility for your sensitive documents to someone else’s computers — this is just asking for trouble. Data corruption, security breaches, warrantless searches. Over the next 10 years, it’s almost a given that your hosted service of choice will be hit by at least one of them.