RAID and DVDs
We’re now the proud owners of a 1TB Raid 1 array — which in reality means that we have 460GB of usable space. Ugh, that was really expensive. Now that I’ve been able to do some number crunching based on reality, we’re gonna need 3TBs to start. (BTW, these drives are running hot as they are fanless and near silent.) Until prices come down on hard drives we’ll have to keep the DVDs nearby instead of putting them in storage. That will allow us to put DVDs on the server but not have to worry about mirroring the drive. The only items that go on the RAID drives will be vital files for which we don’t have a physical copy.

Paperless Home
Meanwhile, I ordered this scanner/printer all-in-one. Why this one? Unlike most home scanners, this baby will scan the front AND back of the item automatically. And I got it for a heck of a lot less than what it says on Amazon. After going through our collection of papers, there’s probably about 120 pounds of materials. We estimate that about 80% of that can be kept digitally (some will have to be kept in physical form). There’s going to be a lot of time spent feeding sheets through the scanner initially, but once the main bulk of work is done, just a few minutes of routine maintenance per week should take care of all the mail. Once we have the scanning down pat, we’ll invest in some OCR software to convert the images to searchable PDFs and script an overnight automation so the OCR does not hog the iMac during the day.

If you’re wondering as to how we’ll dispose of all those scanned documents, we’ll take it to Kinkos, then handle the future items at home. A bonfire is still an option if Em and I really really want to save the $10.