Keepsake Documents

How many old Christmas letters, travel postcards or love notes do you have stored away? Maybe it is to many to be practical. Scanning and then tossing these items can be a solution. For example, I am only holding on to a handful of documents for each year including documents that relate to: great vacations, graduations, family passings or major milestones.

On my 16th birthday, a group of very
close friends gave this card to me.
a happy thought :)
-----------------------------------

Preparation

- If you can use a scanner that can save a file directly to a usb stick it is much faster (not waiting on wifi connection or large hard drive to write to disk).

- Use an empty USB stick if possible.

- Find a cleared off space to work. Work with just one box. This is a slow process. Weed those items that you realize are not worth taking time to scan. Just a simple show box can take the afternoon.

- Be mindful of copyright or intellectual property of scanning greeting cards if content goes openly or inadvertently on the web. I maybe pushing the edge a bit, but is a ~20 year old birthday card such as the one illustrated going to cause a publisher lose sales?

Scanning

- Use a newer scanner if possible made in the last couple of years.

- About 300 dots per inch or DPI setting was a good scan for me. I don't have the patients to do a higher resolution scan and this seemed to work well.

- Most scanners will start with and run a countering scheme. Use it. I would run about 50 documents and then backup stick to computer. I was repeating the process every so often.

- Get to know the option on your scanner, hopefully it has an add to PDF page function. Ultimately you want to avoid new file for each new page scanned.

- On documents, PDF file type format works great.

- On pictures JPG format is great and website friendly too.

- Use a consistent file naming scheme such as "1989 birthday cards steven.pdf". I prefer year first then description to create timelines easily.

Finally, of all these cards, christmas letters, and notes, I bet only a small percentage maybe meaningful to me in 20 years, but for one thing, there are 150+ documents that are going out the door and in the trash today, but will carry on on my hard rive and backup device.

Yeah. I'm closer to my goals. A whole box of letters and memories is just taking up 151 Megabytes or about 2 % of my 8 gigs of space but -- 0 -- physical space on a bookshelf.

Edited: 6/1/2012 an error in the original file type of scanning a document was corrected.