Question, anyone can recommend an all-in-one printer scanner, that can do multi page duplex auto load scanning? Big plus if it can do good OCR and save to PDF.

And no, I’m not an employee or partner – just a happy customer who thinks more people could benefit from their service.

Even so, I am not crazy about reading on computers. You may want to transfer that paper to a plain-text file and load it onto an iPhone or another podclone with text-reading capabilities and read it like a book.

If it’s an actual bill I’ve paid (like the phone), I just keep the paper for three years and then shred.

The newer S1500/S1500M does include an ultrasonic double-feed detector. I wouldn’t buy a document scanner without this feature.

The very best resource blog on scanning is http://www.DocumentSnap.com — in particular, look at the post on the sensible creation of settings to handle different types of documents at http://www.DocumentSnap.com/my.....-settings/. The DocumentSnap web site favors the Fujitsu M510 (for Macs) and S510 (for windows). I fully agree and mine works flawlessly! What a great machine in a small, sensible package and it is so very fast.

The basic Fujitsu software is more than sufficient. Basically, each scanned item can be placed in a typical tree structure, with files named as appropriate. Each document can be renamed during the scanning /filing process; if scanning older paper files for an archive which is likely not to be looked at often, just putting all documents in one folder should be more than sufficient and involve minimal processing time.

Your back-up remarks are entirely correct. Because I’m just starting, I’m doing backup on a separate hard disk using typical Windows “copy file” to another location procedures.

I am very pleased!

I’ve also found that the vast majority of documents I need to keep, never need to be read again other than skimming for specific parts. For example, I need to keep copies of all of my insurance policies, but when I need to reference them it is usually just to read a single line or two. If you have a 200 page document that you need to read on a regular basis, you might want to hang on to the physical copy.

At home I have a scansnap. I use the Freedom Filer filing system for our documents/paper etc. I have scanned in the documents and “filed” them according to the same FF organization headings. At the end of the month I scan in the month’s paper and have a backup. Using FF has reduced the amount of paper in our home already.

We built a home that was involved in a 6 year legal battle. (We won. The builder owes us $150K. He filed bankruptcy. We are getting next to nothing except the dubious pleasure of paying almost twice what we should have for our home, ugh.) I have yet to scan all the paperwork involved but when I am done I will have emptied seven file boxes of document. I also have five boxes that need to be scanned from my father in law’s estate. The man has been dead for ten years and I don’t need to be hanging onto the paper.

As for software versions: Usually there is a period of time between the old and the new software that allows conversion of older documents. I have used adobe. The oldest files seem to work just fine in the newer versions.

If Adobe Acrobat changes in such a way as to never be able to read my .pdf file at some distant point in the future, I have the .jpg that I can run through the latest version of Acrobat.

Also, programs like Evernote will read directly from my image file.