Bod

I have scanned all of my paperwork. Every photo of my children, every business invoice, every school report, every divorce letter, all the pages of instruction manuals to appliances I no longer own. This statement normally elicits one or more of the following three reactions

1) That must take forever

2) You'll be sunk when your computer crashes

3) I bet you can never find anything.

In fact,none of these is true

1) The first scan is from xxxx about a computer virus called Melissa. Nowadays, I stick all of the mateiral that I wish to scan into a wooden clothes peg. On a Sunday, after I've finished with the Sunday paper, I will dig out the scanner and process the week's paperwork. In the spirit of accurate research, I've timed each of the last three sessions. The average is 34 minutes.

2) There's a two word response to that. Back up.

There are currently two complete sets of scans on two different machines, each in a different location. They are also all backed up to the cloud, using Jungledisk. At the time of writing, the whole lot takes up about 11Gb of space.

As well as that, using a macro in XP, each of the databases is compressed down. A 1mb file now takes up about 100k. There are three additional sets of that database - one on a netbook, one on a different machine, one on a USB thumbdrive which goes everywhere with me.

3) Well, that's not true either. Each scan is numbered and then there's a database with a summary description of each file. A search using "find" in a spreadsheet program will reveal the number of every photo or every Orange invoice. And then I can refer back to the database and find what I'm looking for. It depends on the quality of the description in the first place - which is no different from any storage system anywhere. But this could be so much better