I have been employed (yes -- money involved and everything!) to scan several thousand pages into PDF files. To accomplish this, the employer has lent me her Fujitsu FI-5120C scanner. This is a pretty impressive machine, up to 25 pages per minute through the ADF.

I downloaded the appropriate TWAIN driver and installed it, and then (to once again demonstrate my ignorance) found out that the TWAIN driver isn't where the UI to do the scanning is... I have to have software that talks to the TWAIN driver.

The good news is... the scanner talks to my computer. I was able to scan a page from Microsoft Word into *.doc format, so hardware, connectivity, and TWAIN driver are all in order.

What I need is software, that is, the application to scan from. Adobe Acrobat would be the obvious choice since I am aiming for PDF output. But I am not thrilled about the idea of buying Acrobat 9 for $299, and waiting 10 days for it to arrive.

What are my options? Preferably I want software I can download rather than wait for shipping, and I hope not to have to spend hundreds of dollars. The software must be capable of scanning multiple pages into a single document file, and this scanner does support duplexing.

Any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

tanstaafl.

A brief search of my favorite free-ware help site got me to this forum entry:
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/scan-multi-page-pdf.htm
Possibly a couple ideas there.

A little googling got me here:
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/scan2pdf.html

Only have the 5 user reviews to go on if it's ok...

:-)

Thank you!!!

tanstaafl.

You can download a fully functional (I believe) 30-day trial from Adobe.

Stu

I've always been a fan of Vuescan. Not free, but not horribly expensive either.

Best of luck to you. It's a good thing it scans that fast, otherwise this would be quite a chore. Are any/many of the pages double-sided? My old office had a Scansnap that would scan both sides of every sheet that went through, then at the end it would just delete all the blank sides. Very nifty machine (I might have to think about picking one up).

Its a tad expensive but the best software I've found is Kofax VRS if you're doing document imaging. We use it at work and its great for doing scans of paper docs. It'll remove the fuzzy blob caused by coloured backgrounds and sharpen text etc...

Is the finished .pdf supposed to be real, editable text? Or just a raster scan of the originals (images) ??

If it's just images, then xsane on Linux is totally free, and more than up for the job. It will scan to image files, which are then easily imported into an OpenOffice document, and then saved as .doc, .pdf, or whatever. Zero software cost, and a pretty simple and gentle learning curve.

If text recognition is required (conversion to real, editable text), then xsane can work, but possibly commercial payware *may* do a better job.

Cheers

Accoreding to the datasheet:

"Fujitsu fi-5120C and fi-5220C workgroup scanners conveniently include everything inbox to get organizations up and scanning. With the full version of Kofax Advance Exchange Plus; VRS 4.x Professional, Adobe Acrobat Standard, and ScandAll 21 software, users get image enhance-ment functionality as well as the option of scanning directly to PDF, file, print or batch."

So, like most recent scanners, this thing was delivered with enough software to create PDFs.

Employer got CD?

Yes. Somewhere. But doesn't know where. And she's leaving the country for two weeks starting tomorrow morning.

However... this fills the bill admirably, and comes with a 30 day full function free trial. The price is just $89, which I find to be reasonable. I'll use it until she returns and finds the software that is supposed to go with the scanner, and if it turns out that the Adobe and ScandAll software is ugly, I'll go ahead and buy the Infothek software.

This software automatically skips blank pages, and is adjustable for brightness, threshold, and contrast so I have been playing with it, fine-tuning it to get the optimal compromise for legibility and image quality as about 20% of the pages are on a grey-shaded background.

The scanner itself is amazing. It has a 50-sheet document feeder, and when running duplex it scans both sides of the page simultaneously, or more likely nearly so as the two scan heads are probably offset to avoid interfering with each other due to shining through the paper. It will scan a 14 page stack full duplex, 10 pages one-sided, four pages double-sided for 18 page output in 47 seconds. If all 18 pages were double-sided it would take the same amount of time, but output would be 36 pages. That's pretty near 50 pages per minute at 300 dpi.

The first software I tried (the freeware that Robotic pointed me to) turned out to be less than satisfactory, it didn't let me access the TWAIN settings, it locked up if I tried to duplex, didn't give enough control over output quality. So, worst case is I spend $89 and buy this software; best case I get the Adobe and ScandAll from Ms. employer.

First estimate is somewhere around 15,000 pages to scan. If I had a 15,000 page document feeder and wanted to end up with a single 15,000 page PDF file it would only take me 5.2 hours. Since I have to create and name about 600-800 separate files, it may take a bit longer.

Oh, and the 15,000 pages are just the ones she had at home before she goes on vacation. The bulk of them are still at her office. Good news is... I'm being paid by the hour.

tanstaafl.

Of course my answer is "Try it on Ubuntu". I setup my HP all-in-one officejet scanner using a simple setup utility over ethernet. The FI-5120C is fully supported by the linux SANE project. (http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html#Z-FUJITSU)

I wrote a simple script to scan many documents, do some simple processing and write them out as PNG. I suppose it wouldn't be difficult at all to convert the script to support output as PDF instead.

Ahh, here's that script I wrote: http://ben.nerp.net/scan_docs.sh

It's not complicated, and can be easily hacked up into doing lots of nifty automated things.

I know the "Alaskan mafia" reaches into every burg, but don't tell me. Troopergate?

He said "scanner", not "shredder".

Also, check his current "Loc:".

Ug! I'm sitting here with the software disk you need: Scansnap manager/organiser - I use the predecessor to the machine that you have for all my correspondence: Feed it in straight from the envelope, file it, back-up and shred, I wonder if it's available from a fujitsu site somewhere?

Get a (VERY) large hard disk -- looks like 15GB minimum for the finished product, perhaps 5X that space necessary for temporary shuffling of stuff.

Cheers

Right on the money. I'm averaging just about a megabyte per page at 300 dpi. Disk space is not a problem. I have more than a terabyte of space on my computer, one 300GB drive is just sitting there empty. Her ultimate plan is to store the files on a few 8GB flash drives, but I hope to talk her out of that -- that doesn't seem like permanent/secure storage to me. I'm thinking maybe when it's all done, burn the files onto DVD data disks. Don't they hold something like 2.2 GB?

Temporary shuffling is not a problem -- I'm doing one file at a time, rarely more than 50 pages per file.

tanstaafl.

Yes, I meant "into every burg" to include the bay area and silicon valley.

In 2003 I had about 30 job interviews, a good number of them were at motels out by the airport and arranged by anonymous women named "Cindy" and "Anna". So I get there and these guys wearing tinted glasses kept saying stuff like "So it's a given you know something about computers but what do you know about permafrost?" and asking "Why are manhole covers in Nome rectangular?".

I finally caught on. The Alaska Yakuza are *everywhere*.

Actually they hold about twice that. Four times that on dual-layer discs, but those have never (and I believe never will be) cost effective. If you can find them, they're at least four times the cost of regular DVD-Rs.

Anyone here know which of those two data storage methods is the most likely to last for the greatest number of years into the future?

Mmm.. for this amount of data, I would use a couple of RAID1 arrays, with 2-3 8GB USB keys in each array. And maybe a couple of duplicate DVD-DL discs as well.

For my own stuff here, a rapidly expanding collection of 140GB of photos and stuff, it's simply kept on a hard disk, with a full backup on a removeable hard disc.

Somewhat worrisomel, that, but nobody has put the effort into making a better backup media for the modern age yet.

Cheers

I don't know, but I wouldn't rely on either of them. I would probably keep them on a small, cheap hard drive, and transfer them to a new one every couple years. That's at the very least.

I'm starting to like the phrase "if the file doesn't exist in two places, it doesn't exist." It's a good backup mantra.

I think the modern backup media is online backup. Carbonite or Mozy could easily handle 140GB of data (it'll take forever to upload initially, but should be smooth after that). I certainly prefer it over ZIP disks. Or maybe you'd like a nice LS-120 drive?

In my experience Mozy does not easily handle that amount of data. I did in the end (after many, many months) get it to finish the initial backup of my 100GB of data.

However, it really struggle with the daily incremental backups. It can take hours for it to do the initial scan to work out what needs backing up. It then can take ages to backup a few megs of a multi gig file that has just changed a little (a great example of this is Virtual PC drive images). It often doesn't complete a days changes within the 10 hours or so I can let it run at full speed each day.

So great in theory, in practice my home made rsync backup still works much more reliably. Still, at least it works better than Carbonite...

I guess part of it is expectations. I recommend Mozy to home users, people who don't need to back up drive images. I think if Mark needs to back up 140GB of "photos and stuff," it should work as advertised, though the initial backup does take too long. The one area I'll agree on is backing up email. Naturally, a PST file is going to change daily, and depending on how much of a hoarder the person is (I'm a big one), that can get to be a huge file.

For me, I still think off-site storage (taking drives to relatives' houses or to work) is the best way to go.

If you're interested in storing your email long-term, I'd certainly advise against using PST files. They seem to get corrupted way too easily.

Well, not my email. I'm exclusively GMail. And the people who use Outlook that I care about are all obsessive about deleting emails, so their PST files are less than 100MB.

Regardless, I've never seen a PST file get corrupted unless it hit the 2GB limit on certain Exchange servers. Otherwise in the two businesses I've supported with over 750 people total, I've never seen one get corrupted.

Microsoft finally fixed the 2GB PST limit in Outlook 2003 and newer.

The PST files usually aren't actually corrupted when they hit 2GB. Its just that Outlook can't load them once they get past that point so you're kinda stuck. You have to truncate the file, use one of the many recovery tools or upgrade it to the newer can-cope-with-2GB-and-above PST format in Outlook 2003.

For long term mail storage, you should convert it to a text based format or something. I guess mbox would be okay if its just an archive.

Both will lose your data eventually. I'd guess the flash based one would be a bit better.

Flash memory is conservatively rated for about 10 years of data retention before your electrons get out of the gate.

Writeable optical media has issues with the dyes degrading or the metal layer oxidising. Originally the gold CD-Rs were alledgely rated for over 50 years life but I'm not sure I trust those ratings. All of the estimated lifetime tests were done via accelerated ageing in a lab. Its only now that we're getting proper old optical media.

The solution to this is to keep many backups of your important data and copy it onto whatever is mainstream every few years. Your pristine MFM HD from years ago may still work but as FireFox31 found, its a tad annoying to get the data off those things now.

I used to have an accountant who, I found out one day, posted his daily back up tape to himself: "If we have a fire or robbery in the night, we can get the syatem disks back from the bank and be up and running the next day, when the post comes".
I pointed out that if he left the tape on my desk each evening, I could just as easily take it home, saving my company around £800 a year!
I tried BT's digital vault, but found it cumbersome, sometimes it wouldn't recognise my password even when I pasted it, seemed to have a lot of downtime and missed files, without being able to list what they were, so I gave it up as a bad job.

One of the better long-term things you can do is use something like PAR (http://parchive.sourceforge.net/) to add Reed-Solomon data repair codes. This way you can lose/corrupt parts of the base archive and easily recover using the repair files.