Revised estimate: 25,000 pages. That's really about 17,000 sheets of paper, about half of which will be scanned duplex. And that is just the beginning, the files she had at her house. Then there are the files at her office. And let's not forget the storage unit full of files as well. Probably a quarter million page images by the time we're done.

Good news is that the *.pdf file format is quite compact -- the first 2200 images are taking just 240 MB. The whole thing ought to take no more than 30 GB.

It is taking longer to scan them in than I had anticipated, simply because the prep work takes longer than the scanning. About half the originals are stapled in booklet form, and I have to remove the staples and cut the booklets in half with scissors so they will go through the scanner. With the prep and the scanning, plus fixing the occasional paper jam, I'm averaging about 300 pages per hour. That's about 800 hours, I'm limited to about 20 hours per week (otherwise I get penalized by Social Security for too much income) so this little temp job will be good for about nine months. Perfect.

tanstaafl.

Get a guillotine?

The Scansnap comes with a transparent folder to avoid this, although I imagine that any transparent folder, or sheet, the size of your documents would do.
The Scansnap will cope with four thicknesses of paper in the folder, by which method you can make each two page spread a single scan and end up with a correlated document - at the same time being able to re-constitute the original booklet with staples.

I hope I never have so many documents that I *must* keep.

Not useful in my situation.

The booklets (when unfolded but before being cut in half) would give pages 11x17", which is bigger than the scanner can physically hold -- it uses a 50 page document feeder (it is not a flatbed scanner) through which the maximum paper size is 8.5" by 14" (Legal size). The original paper documents will all be shredded once the scanning is done, so re-constituting them is not an issue.

tanstaafl.

All I can say is, whatever data storage method you use, make sure there are multiple backups in geographically diverse locations. It would be a shame to lose so many months worth of work to a simple data loss.

Make daily backups of your work onto USB flash keys as you progress along with your job. At the end of the project, make your final master backups on more than one copy of more than one media. For example, two or three portable hard drives, two or three stacks of burned DVDs, and maybe even two or three sets of usb flash keys.

Then collate each group of diverse media (group=drive+DVDs+flash) and geographically separate them (1 at office 1 at home 1 in safe deposit).

Also, uuencode the whole thing, then print it out on acid-free paper and keep it in a nitrogen-filled vault.

You tease, but my description costs a pittance, and safely preserves all of the work represented by the scanning and by the information scanned from the paper. Protects it from media loss, disaster data loss, and slightly future-proofs it.

Oh. I was going to engrave it on titanium sheets and store it in a vacuum in total darkness at -273 degrees celsius.

Actually, I'm going to have her put the data on a USB hard drive to keep at her office, on another USB hard drive to keep at home, and on a set of DVD discs to keep in her safe deposit box.

The ironic thing is, the data is virtually valueless. The only reason it is being digitized is because of legal requirements. The chances are almost nonexistant that anybody will ever look at a single one of those digitized pages, but federal law requires them to be kept for at least five years after the parties involved reach the age of 21 years. Or something like that.

tanstaafl.

Ah. That should be good enough, then.

Sounds a bit overboard. Just make a Rosetta Disc out of a nickel alloy instead. Much more simple!

It does strike me that if it's never going to be read and is simply taking up space, the best back up would be to put all the paper in the cheapest lock up storage facility: Can't speak for your side of the pond, but if you do an annual rate without immediate access here, it's pretty cheap.
Sssh: That would do you out of a nice little earner!

I realize this is a good gig for you, but did anyone consider calling Iron Mountain (or equivalent) and asking them to ship the boxes off to some desert warehouse for x number of years before shredding them?

Matthew

Ah. I've been wondering throughout this entire thread why you don't seem to be too worried with how to effectively index the content that you are scanning for later search and retrieval.

I love Iron Mountain. Given, I don't work with them face to face, but when I need a report, our librarian takes care of it and I generally get it in my hand by 10am the next day. I think that is awesome, especially considering the amount of data my company alone stores there (most of the reports I look for are qualification test plans and reports from the late 70s to early 80s).

Iron Mountain isn't doing anything particularly special. They just store your big boxes of reports in hopefully a secure area. Show more love to your librarian IMO. Its up to them to tell Iron Mountain that they need box number 0324-233 because it contains the TPS reports from 1972 that you wanted.

We use Iron Mountain to store huge amounts of tape and paper documents along with a daily courier box. The previous incarnation of the offsite storage company before they got bought out by Iron Mountain had much better service. I can't remember what the last bill was like but it was several thousand GBP each month just on tape storage. Document storage is handled by another department and probably even worse due to physical size.

This is San Francisco Bay area, where real estate is preposterously expensive. This is the area where people routinely buy a very nice house for $800,000 and the first thing they do is bring in the bulldozer to knock it down and build their own $800,000 house. There are just a lot more people than land. That said, the cheapest storage would run about $1000--$1500 per year, and would have the drawback of not having the information readily available in the unlikely event that it might be needed. Imagine walking into a 5'x10' storage unit with boxes full of files stacked six feet tall, looking for the file for "John Smith, DOB 11-12-2002". Oh, yes, I forgot to mention -- the temperature outside the storage unit is 90 degrees F, just think what it's like inside!

And even though in all likelihood the files will never be read, nonetheless she is legally required to have them accessible.

The way we're doing it is better.

tanstaafl.

The data is all in discrete files, each ranging from as little as 15 pages to as many as (so far, at least) 500 pages. Each discrete file pertains to all services for a single individual, and should a search and retrieval ever be needed, that individual's name is the leading part of the filename. So, for example, a file might be named Smith, John DOB 01-15-2002 DOT 07-25-2007 making it easy to scroll down through a directory to find the file she needs. Probably by the time it's all done, there will be about 1000 files, a manageable number when scrolling through an alphabetized file list.

tanstaafl.

And you're not bothering with OCR? She'll never need to search for anything other than the patient(?)'s name?

My mother died last year, leaving a very active sole medical practice behind. Seven year record retention required and no one wanted to take her patients/practice on.

Her former office manager/secretary/bookkeeper/best friend got a very nice new metal shed on her farm, and a nice set of filing cabinets (under some well secured tarps against leaks).

On the first damp day after the seven years are up, we'll have a big bonfire. We expect not a single request from those files, but we gotta keep 'em at the ready. Of course, my mother took her notes cryptically, so no one else could even use them if they get them.

-jk

Tell them to make sure that metal shed is bolted strongly to the ground or concrete pad on which it rests.

A similar shed existed in the yard of a hilltop house I once owned. It was mounted on a very nicely-poured concrete slab. One year, there was a significant windstorm (not gale or hurricane, mind you, just a lot of wind) and the shed ended up at the bottom of the hill, while its contents stayed neatly stacked on the concrete slab.

Those metal sheds seem really sturdy and heavy when you're setting them up. The fact that they weigh a ton means nothing to the wind, when their shape and surface area turn them into what is essentially a kite without a string...

Correct. If there is ever a need to visit the records, it will be to retrieve the entire file for a single individual, and in that case all data in the file will be relevant.

tanstaafl.

Interesting point. I'll have to ask. Though knowing her and her husband, it's solid.

thanks,

-jk