The Paperless Hacker
Jason Hunter's latest article on oreillynet.com, "Personal Document Management Made Easy," is a great example of my thesis that "alpha geeks" tell us something about the shape of the future. Jason describes how he's done away with filing paper documents by scanning everything and keeping the scanned documents in a Perforce repository. It's an alpha geek "life hack," but it also does say something about our digital future. Today's hack is tomorrow's mainstream application (or at least a feature of tomorrow's mainstream application.)
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[11.03.06 01:13 PM]
Errr, is the geekiness because being perforce? The CEO of company I did some consultancy for started doing with a Mac, a paperport, and ZIP disks - back in the 20th Century. It started out as a way to image incoming cheques, but became a complete record of his paperwork. Actually, what stopped him upgrading to OS X was a lack of support for his ageing paperport ;-) In the end we wrote a document tracker in FileMaker and AppleScript.
[11.04.06 01:53 AM]
The Swiss Post offers a service that scans (almost) every letter you get and sends it by email. You then get the original documents, too, but you can file it directly and access them from the road even before you get home!
A little pricey at $130 monthly, it is actually geared towards people who are temporarily away from home for a while. But maybe if this takes off, prices could fall down enough.
(sorry, no english version of the page available) http://www.postmail.ch/de/index_pm/pm_privatkunden/pm_pk_nachsenden_zurueckbehalten/pm_postbutler.htm
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Michael Sparks [11.03.06 11:49 AM]
A modern digital camera with macro mode (anything above 3 megapixels) is just as good for this purpose as a scanner in my experience. I do something similar, but using a digital camera makes life a lot simpler, since you can take all your older documents as well and "scan" them in somewhat quicker. (It turns out about as legible, as an actual scan, though having a bright light and not using the flash is the most time effective way of doing this).
It also has a certain element of the spy film feeling :-)
Rather than have a hierarchical storage, I store the pictures by time/date of photographing, but then use an offline file system tag for the pictures instead. (Giving you all the benefits you get with tagging) (3 short python scripts: ls_tag, tag, detag)
The biggest risk to all this though is disk corruption & lack of backups. I had a hard drive failure earlier in the year, which happened to have several thousand of these documents... Certainly gave me pause! Backups are vital there. (Or a decent disk recovery systems which is what I ended up using :-/ ).
(These days for backups I now use an external USB drive for all my data, and it's mirrored (courtesy of rsync) onto the machines I use when I plug it in. Meaning I get auto backup, and the benefit of carrying less between places I normally work, as well as all my documents :-)