<p>I have all of my financial and legal records going back to the mid-1970s and a lot of these are in cardboard or plastic boxes. Some of them are in notebooks/folders and some of them are in several file cabinets where I store more recent (last ten years) stuff.</p>
<p>I’ve been using a program called Growly Notes (it’s a free knockoff of Microsoft One-Note) that is a note-taking program. You create notebooks and these can be subdivided into folders and sub-folders. You can store images, documents, videos, audio files, diagrams, text, etc. in the sub-folders. I’ve put all of my work projects, the kids college stuff, my access codes and work progress reports in this thing. BTW, it also provides encryption at the folder and sub-folder level. It may at the notebook level too but I haven’t tried this. The Notebooks are stored as a container file so backing up the notebook file backs up the whole notebook. I have my notebooks securely backed at an offsite location daily.</p>
<p>Last year, I started saving my tax documents (the ones that were emailed to me or those that I could download from a financial site) in Growly Notes. This meant that I didn’t have to be at my desk to work on taxes (I keep things in a Pendaflex folder + manila folders) for some things. I still had to be at my desk for paper stuff that came in as I put it straight into my file cabinet. This year, I’m taking pictures of paper documents that come in along with pictures of computer screens with data that don’t provide a handy download. This has worked out really well as I don’t need access to documents from my wife or from my filing cabinets to work on my taxes - it’s all on my computer.</p>
<p>This morning I started thinking about putting a lot of other financial records on my computer. We have needed some records in the past that we couldn’t find. I know that we have them but it would take me several hours to find them. So I was thinking of starting a project to digitize records using my iPhone camera. I’ve also had the idea of doing this for the kids’ school work. One kid doesn’t care about her stuff while the other does. This is a project that could take a lot of time but it would be nice to get rid of the boxes in the basement and have easy access to financial records and legal documents when we need them where we need them.</p>
<p>I would love to do this with our pictures but I’d need a better way to get them into digital format. Taking a picture of a picture doesn’t work very well - I’d prefer a bulk scanner. The financial and legal records thing would be a lot easier to do.</p>
<p>BTW, I can share and synchronize the notebooks with other computers (Macs) on our home network so other family members can look at the notebooks.</p>
<p>Anyone else currently doing this or thinking about doing this? What kinds of tools (software, hardware, capture) are you using to do this?</p>
<p>My H does something similar, although when he emptied out the file cabinets most stuff was shreded. He uses a scanner, not that expensive, just the home combo scan/fax/printer. We don’t use anything except folders to save the data. And we don’t use the cloud for backup. He has auto backup and we take a disk to the SD box about once every so often… trying for once a quarter, but not doing it that regularly.</p>
<p>Kids’ stuff is another big issue, especially those big art projects. photos are about the best we could do. </p>
<p>We are getting agressive about it as we want to downsize.
…except that I just brought half my mom’s 3 file cabinets home to sort and start over. gak</p>
<p>I’m sure that we don’t need a lot of the records but I don’t mind digitizing them if the time cost is small. I guess I’m a pack-rat but computers at least make carrying around all of your stuff easy. I just checked prices on disks this morning and you can get 3 Terabyte disks for $130. My laptop has 1.05 TBs of storage space so I can carry everything with me and back it up to a local, off-site drive.</p>
<p>I really admire what you’re doing. My H insists on doing things the old fashioned way. Nothing is electronic. He even keeps track of our finances on paper. Hard to teach an old dog new tricks.</p>
<p>Occasionally, I will go through our files and get rid of papers that we no longer need. H doesn’t have time to do this. I always shred them.</p>
<p>We purged our files (it was a 4 drawer steel cabinet) before we moved from NJ to NC. Nothing like 40 cents per pound moving expense to motivate shedding heavy assets. Tax returns older than 7 years did not make the cut. ah the good old days… gone but not forgotten. The cabinet itself did not make the move either.</p>
<p>BC - Costco had a deal for a 4TB hard drive for 160$.</p>
<p>I’d love to do what you are doing - just incredibly time consuming. I have been moving this way with pictures/videos - but still have so much more to do! Also brought home a ton of old pictures from my mom’s house the last time I visited - haven’t had a chance to digitize those yet. Pictures of pictures do come out pretty good - I found that sometimes, they are better than the ones we’ve scanned in.</p>
For documents, I prefer to store them as PDF files instead of image files. If I want to digitize a document with 5 pages taking pictures requires 5 image files whereas with a PDF the 5-page document is in a single file and easily referenced by you or anyone you send it to.</p>
<p>Yeah, I have an album that I borrowed from my mother a year ago that I’ve been meaning to scan.</p>
<p>Part of the reason for using Growly Notes is that it’s easy to stitch pictures together vertically as a document, like a PDF. It will take PDFs too but you have to scroll within the document as opposed to scrolling through the page.</p>
<p>4 TB for $160 is very nice. I don’t have a Costco membership though and I usually buy that kind of stuff from Newegg. Newegg has them for about $189. BTW, 4 TB is way, way, way more than I need but it’s nice to buy hardware and not have to worry about it for 10 years.</p>
<p>You might want to look into just getting a few USB flash drives. You can get a couple of 8/16GB ones for just a few dollars each, especially if you stick with USB 2.0 instead of the newer 3.0 (Which your laptop may or may not support. Look for USB drives with blue plastic inside to see if it does.).</p>
<p>This way, you could organize your files both electronically and physically. And, since they’re cheap enough, you could always do a yearly backup and leave one set with a trusted family member in addition to a safe deposit box.</p>
<p>I took a small pile of old statements that hadn’t been opened yet and took pictures on my iPhone, synced the pictures with my laptop and transferred them to Growly Notes notebooks. I put the statements in a bag for later shredding (I told my wife not to throw them out in the regular trash).</p>
<p>Using images works well for stuff that’s one or two pages but it makes the document pretty long. So I decided that I would download PDFs from one of my credit card companies instead of taking pictures. They only had a few years online because I lost a card a few years ago and they canceled it and the online history. But I will load the two years into my laptop Credit Card Notebook. Then I’ll toss the statements into the shredding bag if they fall into the time frame where I have the PDFs.</p>
<p>I will look into my other vendors to see if they provide online statements and do the same thing. This will save me the process of taking pictures and uploading them. The downside is that it presents a picture of the first page that has to be scrolled through but the upside is that it will be easier to find a particular statement. My folders are by vendor and then subfolders by year. I am not sorting the stuff going in unless the files are stored that way.</p>
<p>I also realized that I have signed up for paperless statements from some of my vendors to avoid fees and I should grab those and store them. It’s amazing how it’s easy to let that go when you go paperless. I might go paperless with a few other vendors now.</p>
<p>The digitizing of old records is something I’ve discussed with a bunch of tech friends. There is no easy solution for a house but - and this is a big one - if you have access to a modern, intensely outfitted copier that scans and makes pdf’s etc. then the physical process is manageable. Some of the expensive ones can take a bunch of oddly shaped documents and process them in a batch on the fly and turn them into a pdf. You can then break up the pdf later - or take the time to organize up front to do a year, do all utilities, etc. </p>
<p>But otherwise, we’ve all agreed the process sucks if you want to bring all the old stuff forward. </p>
<p>The best way to do a giant mass of photos may be one of the services which takes your stuff and digitizes it. You have to send them the photos, which you get back of course. David Pogue has reviewed them. </p>
<p>Sometimes I wonder digital records are totally preservable without hassle through time. Is it possibe PDF and other image formats will be replaced in the near future? We then have to re-image them and the resolutions could be reduced.</p>
<p>I’m sure that the PDF version today isn’t the same as it was a few years ago. Software that manages documents tags documents with a version number. When it opens up a document, it checks the version number and then either converts it to the current intermediate format, uses older software or reports that the old version is no longer supported. I don’t have any problem storing things in PDF or JPEG but I’ve done rendering and performance work on JPEG code and the code is freely available and I could always just build my own browser to render images.</p>
<p>If a format does go out of general use, I’m sure that there will be conversion programs out there to move things to whatever is current.</p>
<p>I’m downloading ten years of PDFs from one of my brokerage houses to store on my computer. That’s a lot of paper in my file cabinets.</p>
<p>I made a lot of progress on my Fidelity statements and tossed out a lot of trade confirmations that I don’t need. I am going to download PDF statements going back 10 years and then toss the physical copies out. I also turned on electronic statements and notifications and turned off paper coming in. I had a look at Ameritrade and will do the same thing. I am also going to download my Etrade statements for storage - I’m already on electronic statements there.</p>
<p>I plan to look at our utilities too to see if I can download statements from their web sites. If they do, then I could turn off income postal mail. I expect to spend an hour or two on weekends on this for a few months. It’s already greatly improved the appearance of my desks and tables at home. At some point I’m going to tackle the storage boxes with the kids’ records.</p>
<p>You’re more ambitious than I am, but I recently looked at the cost of blu-ray burners and disks for archiving records or photos. They’re down quite a bit, and it appears you can get blu-ray disks with both 25 and 50GB capacities. I’m thinking I’m going to archive some of my more “priceless” files. </p>
<p>We have an entire shed filled with huge engineering drawings (used to be called “blueprints”). We have the AutoCAD files on our computer, but often there are changes made to the drawings during construction, so we have to save the hard copies. We were told to save them for about 10 years. DH was about to toss out some of the pre-2003 drawings. Then he got a call from someone wanting him to work on reinforcing the roof of a building he designed in 1999, so he was glad he hadn’t thrown out those drawings yet.</p>
<p>Just did our natural gas bills for the last two years. The site allows you to see your bill but it doesn’t allow you to download a PDF (boo, hiss). Fortunately, Mac OS X has an option to create a PDF from any document that you can print so I used that option to create PDFs which I dragged over to Growly.</p>
<p>It seems that some sites only have 1, 2 or three years while some financial sites go up to ten years. I’ve been pulling up to three years for my files. My strategy going forward will be to turn off paper statements and just download them so that my incoming pile of mail to process will decline by a lot. Then I’ll have to tackle the file cabinets. I can do those a little at a time - the bigger priority is to get rid of all of the big piles of paper in my office as I worry that I’ve missed something important when I just leave things in piles.</p>
<p>BC - why do you need to keep the utility bills from over two years? I’ve been keeping the bills for the past year and then shredding all the older ones. Same with all the credit card statements…</p>