Eric Mack On-Line

I just ordered a new Palm TX. I'll be doing my own "paperless" (and laptop-less) challenge when it arrives.

I just recently re-organized my hard drives to facilitate backups (pretty much using the ideas discussed here on Torres Talking: { Link }

I set up a NAS server using an old PC and software (NASLite+) from Server Elements. I image my system disk once a week and I use Karen's Replicator ({ Link } ) to backup all of my data every day to the NAS server.

I probably won't scan all of my old paper, but I have started scanning in all new paper as it crosses my desk. I have a cheap (but fairly quick) flatbed scanner and I use Microsoft Office's built-in scanning applications (which I invoke using ActiveWords -- which I LOVE). I then print everything to a PDF using Adobe Acrobat (I know I could scan directly into Acrobat, but I have an older version -- 5.0 -- and I like the limited OCR you get with the MS scanning app).

In retrospect, I think I'm fairly "paperless," already. I'm just going to be more diligent going forward.

In addition, I've been on a "lose the laptop" kick. I actually travelled without my laptop on my last business trip and it was a fairly successful experiment. I used various "portable" apps on a USB drive -- so I still needed to have access to a PC wherever I went -- and I had my old (very old) Palm IIIxe and a portable 2.5 in hard drive as backups. When the Palm TX arrives, I intend to use it to fully replace my laptop and USB drive. It has the ability to do all of the tasks I normally use my laptop for (except create PDFs), and it has both Bluetooth and WiFi. We'll see how it goes.

I see on your paperless mindmap that you use Groove. Do you just use it for personal file sharing/sync, or do you use it with clients, too?

Posted at 11/02/2005 4:34:46 by Scott