Tag Archives: storage

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Managing The Paper Clutter

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I don’t know about most people, but I have stacks of paper all over the place. Articles out of magazines I thought were interesting, old manuscript paper, etc, etc. For receipts, I have been in the practice of scanning those for a while, for taxes and stuff. But the paper stacks, I try to scan them, but it just takes too long (there are a LOT of stacks, and they are fairly thick). My Epson CX6600 is good, but scanning takes a lot of time. And then, there is the “what now” problem.

A sheet feed scanner sounds like a great solution. Fujitsu makes this ScanSnap product that can, supposedly, do up to 18 double sided pages a minute. It’s a good chunk of change though, nearly $500 (they have some rebates going at the moment). It does come bundled with Adobe Acrobat 8 though. Plus, it has some OCR stuff which will allow the scanned things to be searchable.

I had, years ago, a Visoneer Paperport that was great, but it died.

Getting rid of paper is a definite goal, but is it really worth the $$? Having all Continue reading Managing The Paper Clutter →

Reviews

DEVONThink

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I tend to gather stuff while online. Pictures, articles, PDFs, this, that, the other thing. It’s really hard to keep track of stuff. Perhaps it was a website where you read this great article about taking care of your reeds. Or maybe it was that PDF of a solo you downloaded, but what was the file name again? Mac OS X’s Spotlight can only help so much in finding stuff. And on Windows…..you’ll have to wait for Vista for anything like Spotlight.

Fear not. There are a number of solutions for this information overload, and the one I picked was DEVONThink Pro. It’s a great program that can keep track of all the STUFF you gather. All the PDFs I’ve collected. Articles out of FluteTalk, or the Double Reed Society. Or out of Downbeat. I have something like 16 gigabytes in DEVONThink right now. PDFs of songs. I can organize them. Categorize them. Type in some good descriptions. Plus, if I want to find a Beach Boys song, but I don’t remember the title…..I can search on it….instantly.

I don’t really know of anything like this for Windows, but if you have a Mac, you should check it out.