Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [74]
A digital camera
Pictures taken by smartphones are better than no pictures, but at present only dedicated cameras provide really acceptable quality. The good news is that virtually any digital camera these days takes decent pictures and—very important—stamps the date and time on each photo. At the time of writing, only a few cameras support built-in GPS, but if you can afford one with GPS, get it—because where something happened is just as important to your memory as when it happened. I hope by the time you read this that GPS in cameras is mainstream, and I am willing to bet that by 2013, nearly all cameras will have GPS. If you don’t get a camera with GPS, then make sure not to skip the purchase of a separate GPS unit.
A personal computer
Laptop or desktop, your personal computer will be essential. If your computer is more than a couple of years old, consider buying a new one. Not surprisingly, for Total Recall, memory is a critical component. Buy a computer with as much disk memory as you can afford; at least a hundred gigabytes for a laptop or three hundred gigabytes for a desktop computer. Purchase an external disk of five hundred gigabytes or more for backup. Get the latest-generation operating system so you will have integrated features like desktop search and photo-tagging. Apple’s Leopard and Microsoft’s Vista can do this for you.
An Internet connection
An Internet connection is essential so that you can take advantage of online billing and other items that are born digitally—each one represents paper that you won’t have to scan. Paying for a faster link in the upstream direction (from your home to the Internet) may be helpful for backing up to a cloud service, or making your files accessible from a home server. But high bandwidth isn’t essential if you won’t be moving a lot of data from your home to the cloud.
A scanner
You need a scanner that can digitize anything you have on paper: memos, letters, health records, pictures, slides, business cards, and so forth. Scanners that handle multiple sizes and types of paper are worth the extra expense. Scanners should allow you to digitize one piece of paper or a stack of papers, simultaneously scanning both sides.
I use the Fujitsu ScanSnap desktop scanner. It’s nice and small, and I find it so handy that I have one at work and another at home. It lets me stack in pages and scans both sides at once directly into Adobe’s PDF format. The current generation of desktop scanners comes close to meeting my ideal that scanning a document be as easy as discarding it. Ultimately scanners will be so reliable that we can confidently shred the document the moment the scan is complete. But we aren’t there yet.
A flatbed scanner is great for mementos, like medals, plaques, and so on. Unlike a digital camera, it always gets the lighting right. Some stuff just won’t fit in any scanner, though, so sometimes you will have to use a camera; if you can get it outdoors on a cloudy day, you can often get it nicely lit without reflections.
Finally, make sure your scanner software is performing optical character recognition (OCR) on the scanned pages so that later the computer will be able to search for the text inside them.
DEALING WITH WHAT YO U ALREADY HAVE
Properly equipped, you are now ready to convert your old analog life’s worth of papers and memorabilia to digital form.
Set a goal of being paperless within a year. Besides scanning the paper you already have, you should also arrange to receive more born-digital communications in the future, to reduce the flow of paper that you need to scan. Request that all statements, invoices, and