Virtualization Document Management
Managing papers is tough - it maybe the biggest obstacle on the road to be organized. What is the possible exit from this dark tunnel? Jason Hunter at ONLamp shares his way - by virtualizing his document management. It means that every paper documents are scanned and converted into digital formats, and kept in an organized way in his PC. The steps involve finding the suitable revision control system, a scanner, and a good file and directory convention:
Several years ago I noticed something funny about my habits as a technologist. My hard drive was always immaculately organized, while my office looked like a three year old had spent the day locked inside. To help organize my papers I tried a few physical-world organization ideas–like using cubby holes to store documents (quicker inserting than vertical files)–but no matter what I tried, eventually all my documents ended up in a big pile. I honestly don’t think techies are by nature motivated to keep the real world as organized as they keep their virtual world.
That led to a solution I’ve used now for several years: virtualize my document management! It’s a system that worked great for me and I think will work for any tech-savvy person, so I’ll share it here in the hope it might help you. It involves a Perforce revision control system, a document scanner, and several hard drive organizational conventions and file editing habits. If you’re a techie and want your physical life more organized using virtual tools, read on.
The biggest reminder for me is to come up with one directory & file naming convention and stick to it.
How do you manage your paper? Have you gone down to the virtualization route?
What’s on Jason’s Hard Drive - [OnLAMP]
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Comments
David Nesting says on November 8th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
I’ve used this approach for a few years as well. Whenever I go through my mail, or collect some documents that I need to “file”, I just put it in a stack on top of my scanner, and when I’m in the mood, it all gets scanned onto my PC and copied over to an external USB drive as a backup. Unless the original is truly important (like a car title), it gets tossed.
My only problem is the self-discipline needed to (a) reliably go through all of my mail in a timely manner; and (b) find time to deal with the stack of papers on top of the scanner.
I second the need for a clear, unchanging directory and file naming structure. “Timeless” documents go into a root directory (birth certificates, car titles, etc.), while everything else goes into folders for the year. Receipts get named with the date, the name of the store, and the major items on the receipt. Other documents get named with the date (if necessary) and a description of what it is. I normally save PNG images, or an occasional PDF for something with more than two or three pages (like my taxes).
I’ve found that a fairly flat directory structure is necessary. I only categorize by year, because when I’m looking back for a piece of information, I usually know what year it was in, but it’s rare that I know the exact date, so it seems wasteful from a retrieval perspective to have to look through a bunch of different folders for something. Windows has a perfectly usable sort feature for folder listings.
Omri says on November 9th, 2006 at 12:55 am
My directory structure is also fairly flat. The folders in the root directory are for the part of my life the documents come from (school, finances and receipts, jobs, library). Then the first-level subdirectories are based on what kind of documents (for the library of academic papers and books, it’s by topic… for jobs, it by the specific job… etc).
I’ve actually found that an intuitive directory structure and a good desktop search engine minimizes the importance of consistent naming conventions. If it’s never more than 10 or 20 files per directory - or if those documents are text recognized so that they’re searchable - then you always know either where to go or can find what you’re looking for without any problems.
Omri says on November 9th, 2006 at 1:01 am
I just read the linked story, and it reminded me of something else that’s probably worth mentioning. He discuses multiple layers of security for protecting your documents, including BIOS, HD, and system passwords. I’ve always found those to be a bit of a hassle. It could be that I’m just begging for a disaster, but I settle the regular Windows password and keep all of my important files on an encrypted virtual drive partitioned on my laptop’s hard drive. It’s a de-facto hard drive password (in case someone steals your laptop and removes the harddrive physically) and it’s a lot easier than all that other stuff.
Then again, given my predictable-for-a-grad-student credit rating, I’m hoping that someone will steal my financial identity so that maybe I can get a new one
Steve says on February 7th, 2007 at 12:34 am
I have used 2 tools in the past for organizing: PaperPort and eCopy Desktop. They are relatively inexpensive desktop apps that help in the scanning and archival of paper docs. Both contain search functionality as well. Cool site with info:
http://www.scanguru.com/news.php
Daniel Kim says on April 28th, 2007 at 5:00 am
When I was a graduate student, I had a habit of photocopying relevant research articles for later reference. After the first hundred or so articles, I found that I couldn’t locate them reliably. I needed a filing system that was better than the “reverse-chronological” file that I was using (I put them in a pile, and the newest or most recently read papers end up at the top of the stack).
After some false starts, I simply wrote a serial number on the top of each photocopy, and filed them by that number. I then entered relevant bibliographic information into a database*, keyed to this serial number. If I needed a particular document, I could look up its location in my computer, then pull the serially-numbered paper out of the file drawer. I would have to be careful to re-file the paper.
I have since applied this method to managing my wife’s sewing patterns.
*(At that time, I was the proud owner of a Tandy Z-PDA; an early palmtop computer. It did not have a native database application, so I used its Address Book application for the database, with good results.)