My wife and I will soon be moving to a much smaller house, and are therefore divesting ourselves of lots of our stuff. Among the things we’d love to not have to move are many boxes of old papers, from her career as a teacher, mine at a museum, college papers, and even older things that I haven’t looked at in decades.
They include hand-written stuff, typed and printed (some with dot-matrix printers!) There are probably things like magazine articles, brochures, and some photos, although I already have a good flatbed scanner for making high quality scans of photo prints, negatives, and transparencies.
I’m toying with the idea of buying a high-speed document scanner like the Brother ADS-2700W. My idea is that if I can avoid moving and storing some of our 15+ boxes papers, it will be worth the few hours of tedium it will take to do the actual scanning.
Have you done a project like this for work or home? How did it turn out? Advice? Pitfalls to look out for?
We use the Fujitsu fi-7160 scanner at work for certain processes, and they’re great. Very reliable and very fast (60 pages per minute) duplex scanner. But for what you’re talking about, it’s more complicated. You really need to scan stuff in very small batches, and then name the scanned files and put them in folders appropriately. If you scan a pile of unrelated papers, are you getting one PDF? Or separate PDFs for each page? Some documents are single pages while others are multiple pages.
I also used to use a big document scanner for work with the same issue. Most(all?) scanning software should include some sort of cover sheet you can print to separate each document. You have to deal with printing out the cover sheets and then stacking everything in order, but it certainly saves time in the long run.
FWIW, I had to do something similar once in my life – with thousands of pages, not all of letter or legal size.
I Googled around and found a local company that scanned documents for a few cents a page. I brought a number of boxes to them and, a week-ish later, they handed me a few DVDs.
AFAICT, everything scanned perfectly. They didn’t miss an envelope or a Post-It.
They had lots of flexibility for the outputs – file types, media types, etc. I had lots of control over the end product.
Many years ago I bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap and absolutely loved it.
It would consume whatever I tossed in it, and would automatically generate PDFs for each doc. depending on which mode I chose when starting it. It would then postprocess with OCR software and add searchable text to each PDF.
In general, each time you feed it a doc, with no matter how many pages, it generates one PDF. That means, if you put in a stack of 50 pages, it will zip through all of them in a minute and make one PDF. If you want more than one PDF, then feed them in smaller groups.
There was a setting for “split them all into separate PDFs” but I didn’t use that because most docs were multiple pages anyway.
I did all my bills with this, all receipts, all other documents.
I took books to the band saw, cut off their spines, and fed them to the ScanSnap.
In many cases this has proven to be an excellent choice. I believe I scanned far more than really was necessary though (who needs credit card statements from 2009?).
These days, with electronic receipts and billing, I have far fewer things to scan, so I dumped it. My current needs are hundreds of pages of sheet music, and the occasional receipt. For this purpose I use the Scanner Pro app by Readdle on my iPhone or iPad to make awesome PDFs using the phone camera.
I did something like that a few years back. I think we already owned our Brother all-in-one unit then - not a high-speed scanner, just routine speed.
I grouped papers logically - e.g. 2009 bank statements for account A, 2009 for account B, stock statements for X for 2011 and so on.
I would run one stack through the document feeder, then as soon as it was done, put it aside and do the next stack. I piled them together, but oriented them differently on the pile so I could separate batches - e.g. 2009/A was portrait, 2009/B was landscape.
When I’d finished a few batches, I would sit down with that stack of paper, pull up the scan PDFs one at a time, and glance to make sure the entire handful was done with no missing pages. Then I would rename that PDF to something logical e.g. BANKA_2009_01_12.pdf. And then I would put aside the papers to be shredded or discarded (or in a few rare cases, filed away if we felt we needed the originals as well).
At some point, then or shortly after, I made a folder on Dropbox for each category, and moved the documents as appropriate.
Since then, I mostly download the bank statements, cc bills etc directly , so that truly was a one-time exercise. And it was very liberating - a lot less wasted space, and I can find whatever I need quickly.
The whole process took a couple of weeks off and on - an hour here or there - but it was pretty mindless once the initial sorting was done.
Same here. My old Scan Snap died when it got dropped moving it, so I replaced it with a newer Scan Snap iX 1500. It’s fantastic, better than the old unit. I have it scan, OCR, then upload directly to Evernote as my searchable, taggable document repository. Super pleased with that setup.