And even if one had one of those tiny USB drives that have no case(pretty cool), just put it in an envelope (or a gum wrapper, in the case of the photo 
).
Funnily enough, I intend when I have the available funds, to print out every worthwhile digital photo I have and keep them in photo albums or scrapbooks, for the very reason you cite.
I guess I’m at the far, far end of liberal in this case. I used to have a file cabinet where I’d toss papers as I got them, but then I realized that it’s all digital already. Credit card statements go immediately from the mailbox into the trash, on the rare occasion that they come (I’m paperless with all of them, but a few send occasional quarterly or yearly statements). I don’t get much regular mail beyond bills, and all of those can be looked up online.
Tax documents are online, as well. Filed tax returns are PDF’ed and saved. That once heavy file cabinet now has… erm… well, what the hell is in there? looks Oh, birth certificate, and some work documents.
From what I have scanned, and what I have left to scan, I suspect the saved images will total around 1,000. Perhaps 800. Fine.
Already poking at an Excel Spreadsheet that has pretty much enough columns and whatnot to allow me to pull areas of interest and find a document in a few moments. That’s the goal. Nothing more. Before I shred a single document, though, the entire set will be backed up into several locations. Then I shred !!! I’ve got about 4 reams of paper to be shredded, it appears.
This is quite different than the Photo Albums Project I’m 1/3 of the way through. In that case, each photo is scanned at the highest res possible. I get the electronic images, the ex gets the actual albums. I’m fine with that. I’ll sludge through them and make a file of the ones I REALLY love, and make sure they are all 4x6. Then, post-holiday one year when Wal Mart is running one of those insane specials where you get to do 4x5 prints for .05 cents apiece, I’ll recreate the albums.
That’s easy. For some reason, this paperless project is more layered and complex.
PDF is not a good format for saving scans even if some scanner software might make it easy.
I scan all monochrome documents at 300 DPI and save as CCITT FAX4 TIFF which provides the best compression by far and allows multi-page files. Kodak Imaging, which used to come free with windows 98 and which I still have with XP allows annotations and other fancy stuff with the documents. 300 DPI is the minimum for reasonable quality with small print and CCITT FAX4 TIFF compression makes for small file sizes.
PDF is really not suited for that purpose and most will use JPG which is not suited either.
I have never felt the need to have an index because I just name the documents appropriately and then file them in folders logically.
I gradually started going digital years ago and did not really need to scan much old stuff. I just started doing it with the new stuff. More and more stuff is electronic anyway.
OTOH, I just spent quite a bit scanning and retouching a legal document almost 100 pages long. I do not understand why they do not give it to me in electronic form.