Paperless Home Office - scan size

gemmaj

Hi,
I'm trying to set up a paperless (or at least less paper!) home office by scanning everything where I don't need the originals.

I got my scanner/printer yesterday (a hp) and I am trying to figure out how best to scan the documents. It defaults to a tiff file - at 200dpi it is 500kb a page (b&w), at 300dpi it is 1mb a page.

I just tried JPEG (at work on their scanner) and a JPEG is 500kb for 300dpi, which is better.

I haven't tried any extra compression on the Tiffs, my scanner doesn't seem to give me the option? Or it does but I haven't found it yet!

Does any one else scan documents, and what format / size do they find works?

Thanks for any help!

superscaper

Ahh yes the promised paperless office, never really happened did it. The average workspace required by a design engineer is now far more even though they use CAD/computers compared to the days when they required large drawing desks. Depending on the documents maybe it's worth looking into OCR (optical character recognition) software. That way you could save many pages as word documents etc. I've done it a couple of times, hassle to set up but once you get going it's relatively easy. If you want more of an actual copy I think it best to stick with JPEG and a resolution dependant on the quality you want.

cwoodham

I agree with superscaper, think about OCR because this will make your documents searchable.

You should also think about a second hard drive to back up all the scanned files along with your other data. If your primary drive goes belly up you wont have your paper copies to fall back on.