From Paper to Ones and Zeros: Digitize Your Life

If you still have boxes of old photos and important documents in your home or garage, it’s time to say goodbye to all of that clutter and digitize everything. With the help of a few devices, you can go from paper to ones and zeros in no time. Find out how you can digitize everything from photos to important documents.

Document Scanners

Document scanners aren’t new, but they certainly continue to be useful. With the help of a document scanner, you can digitize all your important documents and file them away digitally. In digital format, documents not only take up less space, but they’re also easily searchable.

Depending on the volume of documents you need to scan, I recommend either a flatbed scanner or one with an automatic document feeder, or ADF. If you have a lot of paper, the ADF will make the process much faster and smoother. An all-in-one printer with a scanner is a great investment because it takes up much less space than having a separate printer and scanner.

FastFoto

Like documents, photos can take up a lot of valuable real estate in your home. More importantly, storing photos on paper leaves them vulnerable to fire, flood, and aging. The best way to preserve your precious memories and create more space around your home is to digitize them. The Epson FastFoto scanner is specifically designed to scan photos, making it possible to scan thousands of photos at just one second per photo. It also comes with smart editing and photo organization tools so you can file your photos away knowing they’ll be easy to find later.

Storage

Now that you’ve digitized all your files, what should you do with them? Well, it’s important to store your important documents and precious photo memories in a secure way. For starters, I recommend investing in a network attached storage, or NAS, device. This will keep all your important files on your home network, making them accessible to all of the devices in your home. I would also recommend backing everything up in the cloud. Services like Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive offer the perfect solution for backing up important items. Even after you’ve uploaded all your files to your NAS, make sure you back them up in the cloud as well to ensure that they’re safe from accidents or device failure.

To organize all your documents, create folders that are narrow enough to make it easy to find items you need while being broad enough to accommodate more than just one or two documents. Over the years, I’ve learned that both documents and photos are best organized in large folders labelled by year and then in smaller folders that specify the type of document or event.

By Mike Agerbo

January 24, 2020