The war on paper, part 7

A lot of you have asked (and by a lot of you, I mean one, which technically is infinitely more than none, the more common number of questions, so I hold a lot to be valid) about organization and backups of the scans.

Organization: Currently I organize the files the same way I organized them in the filing cabinet. Scansnap creates folders where it deposits the PDF’s, as well as running a pretty decent OCR algorithm through to make them searchable. So, if I ever needed to find record of a purchase in ‘07, I browse to the ‘07 folder and perform a word search. A couple of test runs has thus far proved fruitful.

Backups: Currently backups are performed onsite. I have a simple D-Link NAS setup in the living room with a 1TB and 500GB hard drive in it. I run GFI Home backup which works well and is free. Every 10 days it performs an incremental backup of my system on one of the two drives. I have the same setup running on my wife’s machine. Admittedly, this means that I can lose up to one week’s worth of work, but at the same time it can take a while for a corruption to manifest, and I prefer incremental backups, so I prefer a method where my backups are a few weeks out of day vs. having recent updates that are both corrupted, and then all of the data is lost.

At some point in the near future I hope to setup a backup of critical data to a cloud source. I’ve not settled on a particular solution, though I’ve looked at Mozy, Carbonite and Skydrive. I’d rather avoid the monthly maintenance fee so I’m trying to keep critical data to minimum to remain with the free offerings of the different services.

On a side note, you may notice that there is a wireless router next to the NAS. It’s actually a WiFi repeater, not a router, configured to extend my existing network to make it wireless and have the NAS in the living room without running lots of ethernet through the ceiling and walls. Admittedly, this slows down the backup process, but there are multiple reasons to set it up there. Some may ask why (or not), but that is a story for another day.