Are you paperless?

A week or so ago I talked about saving your files to an online sight after the Bootstrapper blog showed 50 sites that will do that for you. Today we will continue that as Small Business Trends has a blog entry from David Bohl which discusses the paperless society and how you can contribute to it.

You need to make the decision to go paperless and how you are going to do it. You can use an online service like we mentioned previously or you can simply save items to your own computer.

Mr. Bohl goes over four things you should have in order to start saving your items to your computer and I will discuss my opinion of them.

The first thing you need (obviously) is a scanner. He links to an article that talks about dedicated scanners but I do not think not is necessary when your first getting started although you may need one long term. I currently use an all-in-one printer scanner fax and copier and it does the scanning job just fine. While the printing function has died, I can still scan to my computer just fine.

Next you need software and Mr. Bohl recommends Adobe. Adobe is the most common but if it's just you and you do not intend to share these files look to some lower price alternatives. I would recommend that you check online reviews of the product before you buy.

If you are going to be saving a great deal, I would recommend a second hard drive. In addition also purchase a backup drive so if anything happens to your computer you do not loose your data.

If you have multiple computers you will need to network them all.

That will get you started, how you proceed is up to you.