Converting my office to a paperLESS workspace

[crobusa]

Just to mention, we have 3 ceiling-to-floor file cabinets to OCR.

Do you an idea how much your inital scan/shread job will be? Ongoing?
Also think alot about workflow.. You print out form, customer signs, you scan and shread?
Do you also scan corresponse you just printed, or can your system handle both PDF and word docs, etc.
Make a pretty flow chart of they types of forms you use.

 

[imported_Condor]

Originally posted by: dullard
In general, paperless offices tend to use more paper than standard offices. Human nature does it in. Instead of having one office manual/memo/document that gets passed around, everyone has a computer copy. Sounds great at first. Then human nature rears its ugly head. No one likes reading from a screen, so each one of your employees prints a copy of that manual/memo/document. Instead of one hard copy, you now have ten hard copies. Of course, someone is careless and loses his/her copy. No problem. Your coworker will just print it again, and again, and again.

Good luck, it can be done, but I think you'll need luck.

After years of the State Department trying to become paperless, my experience parallels yours. You just can't seem to get past the human factor.

For the OP, in a small office, you should be able to make some headway. You are the boss and your employees will have to listen.

 

[imported_Condor]

Originally posted by: iamwiz82
This is a bad idea unless you have a great disaster recovery plan.

Yes, one of the key points in a good disaster recovery plan is off site storage. Your external HD will lend itself to that, but you will need more than one. Snap drives used to be pretty good as the skftware does automated, real time backups based on criteron that you establish. Most good backup apps will do that. I would go with COTS (commercial off the shelf) software instead of attempting to do a unique DB. The designers of the COTS software will have worked out many of the bugs and would have planned for things you may overlook. You also need to keep your backup drive in a fireproof housing. That is pretty easy to do as most drives are pretty small and don't generate a lot of heat. If DIY, then think Walmart. They have pretty cheap containers designed to hold paper products that can be modified to allow electroinc access for the drive to PC interface whether it is USB, Firewire or something else. Depending on your volume, you will need to swap the onsite HD with the offsite HD weekly or daily. Daily is a bit too frequent, but allows the files to be very current and the mirror will be quick.

 

[imported_Condor]

Originally posted by: Megamorph

Originally posted by: MikeyIs4Dcats
Go the PDF route. Of course you will need paper copies of contracts and signed documents for legal purposes.

So PDF instead of OCR? I assume any version of Acrobat will work?

If you need the capability of editing the file, you will need the full version - the expensive one! Many of your backups will be Word docs probably. The pdf files will be the ones with seals, sigs, etc.

 

[imported_Condor]

Originally posted by: Megamorph

Originally posted by: MikeyIs4Dcats
No. RAID1 is an instant mirro copy of the drive. If Drive 1 fails before you backup to your EHDD, you've lost everything since the last backup.

Well that sounds better than the external option. Why doesn't everyone use RAID1 instead of these external drives? Sounds like the way to go.

You will need external drives for offsite storage. They can be in addition to the internal RAID, but still important for data security.

Modify: One of the posters mentioned a commercial back up company. Good point! Relieves you of the burden of transporting a backup device and securing it yourself. On the cheap, the extra HD and manual rotating will work.

 

[Peetoeng]

Another vote for commercial backup software. Start reading on basic backup routines (full/incremental/differential).

Find out the volume needed to figure out which media you need for your backup. Perhaps, a cd for daily incremental, a dvd for weekly full backup.

RAID1 + external backup + discipline backup routine =

 

[randomlinh]

Originally posted by: mercanucaribe

Originally posted by: tfinch2
Enterprise or not, you get what you pay for. It's his business and the data is probably very important to him. If it wasn't, why would he even keep it?

Umm... isn't the reason for RAID 1 so that he doesn't lose data if a hard drive crashes?

Yes, I know you get what you pay for, but if shells out for a huge SCSI solution, he won't have a business anymore.. heh.

As for RAID 1.. yes, that was for in case one drive dies.. but that's still not a good solution. For him, I would still say RAID 1 + ext HD backups + dvd incrementals maybe + a remote solution. IDE/SATA isn't THAT bad. But that's my opinion anyway.

But that is really generalized... he may have an insane number of documents to digitize, and my suggestion may not be feasible.

 

[mercanucaribe]

Originally posted by: randomlinh

Originally posted by: mercanucaribe

Originally posted by: tfinch2
Enterprise or not, you get what you pay for. It's his business and the data is probably very important to him. If it wasn't, why would he even keep it?

Umm... isn't the reason for RAID 1 so that he doesn't lose data if a hard drive crashes?

Yes, I know you get what you pay for, but if shells out for a huge SCSI solution, he won't have a business anymore.. heh.

As for RAID 1.. yes, that was for in case one drive dies.. but that's still not a good solution. For him, I would still say RAID 1 + ext HD backups + dvd incrementals maybe + a remote solution. IDE/SATA isn't THAT bad. But that's my opinion anyway.

But that is really generalized... he may have an insane number of documents to digitize, and my suggestion may not be feasible.

I'm saying that there is no reason for SCSI, because the whole reason to use RAID 1 is so a drive failure is ok. The only benefit of the SCSI would be that it would be less likely for BOTH drives to fail, which is pretty damn unlikely.

 

[sygyzy]

Get a standalone scanner. PDF. OCR.

 

[shoRunner]

in my experience for a small company of a couple employees, raid 1 plus either backing up to dvd and/or external hd is usually sufficient. just be sure to back up often. if you have a network you could get a NAS that automatically backs up your data overnight (like mirra).