[Techtalk] home server and digitizing documents

[Elwing]

On May 7, 2014, at 12:35 PM, Chris Hardy <chris.madrone at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm rethinking my household server/network and one thing that I need to address is digitizing archival documents (tax receipts and handwritten journals).  
> 
> I have a freeNAS box and an ESXi box running a variety of linux and windoze virtual machines (unfortunately freeNAS isn't really stable on a VM, hence the separation).  I also have a mac laptop, but am reluctant to invest in mac-dependent archival gear since I doubt that I'll stick with mac for the next decade.  
> 
> What setup works for you?  what hardware are you using?  Is ScanSnap really the only document scanner solution? What software are you using for OCR? What are you using for document management like indexing and search? 
> 
> Thanks for any thoughts and experiences!
> 

I use a combination of Evernote and backups.  I have a local Evernote folder(s) for sensitive things (tax documents with SSNs, etc).  It gets backed up encrypted to a local drive as well as a friend's NAS via Crashplan.  Evernote can write to any "local" folder, so you can share your FreeNAS via AFP/SMB/etc and just have the Evernote local folders symlinked/aliased to your NAS.  I also use the Evernote service (Premium) for things like receipts, where I don't care who knows/sees that content.    I use a scansnap for scanning, directly into Evernote - then either the Evernote service does the OCR for me, or the local Adobe Pro (comes with the scansnap) does it for me - depends on if it's going local or not (you can set up various "targets" in the scansnap software).  I'm pretty much all Mac, but my boss uses his scansnap between both Mac and Windows (the hardware is identical, the software it comes with is different).

-Elwing