Archiving Documents

A few months ago, we took a look at our filing cabinet in our office.  We have a lot of documents that we have saved, just in case we had a need for that information.  Unfortunately, over time the amount of paper continues to increase.  So I decided to look for a solution for me to digitize all of this content.

The Evernote blog had a post about Pixily/OfficeDrop.  This is a service where you can mail your documents in and they scan them and run OCR software.  Then they host the files in a digital locker, where you can search or organize them.  This seemd like a reasonable service, but it works best for scanning documents as you receive them.  In order for use to scan through our backlog of documents, it would have cost several hundred dollars.

We decided not to go with OfficeDrop, not only because of the cost of scanning our backlog of documents, but also for the cost of the service.  The amount of storage that you get, I feel, is not worth the monthly charge.

We decided to do the scanning ourselves.  We bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M document scanner to do the scanning.  This scanner will quickly scan a batch of multiple side documents.  The included software has some pretty useful features:

1. Automatically detects the number of printed sides on a sheet


2. OCR and creation of searchable PDFs