Comment Jams and MultiFeeds - Live with it (Score 1) 311
I've got a Canon GS-50, and over the past month have made the transition from huge amounts of papers to everything digitized.
My solution for multi feeds and jams? Notice, recover, and rescan. It honestly doesn't take that much longer. You will want to keep a quick eye on every page, anyways, in case of poor scans, off-perpendicular feeds, OCR-recognition failures (not so much the accuracy of the text, but the analysis confusing a block of text with graphics), and to trim blank or excess pages (page 8 of a 7-page duplex document, or page 2 of my financial statements which are the exact same notices 10 years running). Fire and forget would be lovely, but it doesn't happen.
It isn't like I only have a few things to scan, either. I have more than 15 kilos (33lbs) of documents to shred, plus the ~4 kilos (9lbs) I've already shredded and about another 10 kilos (22lbs) of scanned papers that don't need to be shredded before recycling (e.g. college club annuals). For the record, there are about 100 pages of standard 8.5x11 paper to the lbs (220 pages to the kilo -- equal to about 6500 sheets -- although many of the pages were significantly smaller like checks and the 'keep for your records' portion of bills).
It took less than a month at a couple hours a day to handle approximately 12,000 page-faces (lots of duplex pages, and the total sheet count is closer to 9,000 given how many were undersized pages).
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Is it worth keeping old records? That depends. Some of these documents (e.g. my mother's living will, my house's deed) I need to keep a physical copy around regardless. Although this leaves me a copy on hand and I can put the original in a safe-deposit box. Some of these documents have limited lifespans (did I really need to scan the bank statements escrow account for my former tenant who moved out years ago? Probably not). Others are good to have forever -- I've looked up phone numbers from phone bills 15 years old, to get back in touch with someone. I need to keep many of my investments receipts so I can deal with taxes when they are sold.
For me, it is much easier to be a pack-rat of electronic files that fit onto a USB key, than to have stacks of papers around the house. If you don't have that much paperwork, don't need to store it indefinitely, or don't have the MustKeepEverything instinct, it probably isn't worth it to scan everything.