If you’ve been following along with our series on Scanning and Saving Important Documents you’re ready for our third article (if not, jump to related articles at the bottom of this post). In our last article, we covered the scanning and related software, leaving you with some image files and questions about what to do next. Today, we’ll outline file naming, folder structures and storage.
As always, we have a couple of things to remind you about before jump into our project. First, keep your document and files protected. Second, this is your project. Our articles are suggestions on how to handle this type of project, but you should definitely structure and organize your document scanning in a way that keeps things simple for you. After all, if a project like this became too complicated or confusing, who would actually finish it?
File Naming
For each of the documents you scan onto your computer, you will be asked to provide a name. In the spirit of saving time and frustration, I recommend that you name them as you scan them. Playing the “I’ll take care of it later” game will only cause you more headache when you have to go back through all of the files and open them up one-by-one to properly label them. It is important to follow a certain naming pattern when saving these files as well. Doing so will aid you in locating these files later on.
A naming structure can be anything you like, but there are several key bits of information that you should include:
- General description of document
- Year of document creation/coverage
- Company/Entity who issued document
Example Structure: year – gen. description – company
Example: 2010 – Car Insurance _ Civic – State Farm
The benefits of naming individual files with this type of system are numerous. Mainly, should your folder structure get overly complicated or you simply forget where you stored things, you can simply run a keyword search for the document you need. In the case of the example above, I could look up “car insurance,” “civic,” or “State Farm” to find the policy for my car. If I stored scans of multiple car insurance documents, the results would be very east to look through and pinpoint what I need. Also, by putting the year of the document first, the documents will always be labeled in numerical (chronological) order, since Windows displays documents in alphabetical order by default.
Folder Structure
Equally as important, if not more, is the structure of the folders in which you store these files. Without a well-thought-out folder setup, your files will quickly become too much to handle and you’ll find yourself lost in the madness. Again, this structure is ultimately up to you, but here are some examples of structures that might work for you
Example 1: Simplified Top Level
- Insurance
- Medical
- Home
- Car
- Legal
- Taxes
- Will
- Home
- Personal
- Identification
Example 2: More Categories
- Home
- Insurance
- Taxes
- HOA Paperwork
- Car
- Insurance
- Title
- Registration
- Financial
- 401k Information
- Taxes
- Personal
- Medical
- Legal
Storage
SECURITY first!
You want to store your documents where you can get to them easily after a disaster or simply to update them, but you don’t want them easily found by others. Another important rule for storage is “don’t put all of your eggs in one basket!” Store your files in multiple places, even if one of those places is not easy to get to. You don’t want to put forth all of this effort and have it wiped out by a tornado, flood, fire, etc. You’ll also want to make sure that any storage method you use is password protected and encrypted, if at all possible.
Here are some ideas of storage devices you can use:
- Jump drives (also known as Flash drives or USB sticks)
- CD
- DVD
- External Hard Drive (most likely overkill, but maybe you want to store all of your photos as well)
- Online backup
- Online storage (like Dropbox)
- Flash memory cards
Keep in mind that you’ll need to be able to access the information stored on any device, so using something like a flash memory card will require the proper hardware to read it. Jump drives and CD’s are far more universal and will be easier to open later.
Related Articles
Hurricane Preparedness – Scanning and Saving Important Documents
Hurricane Preparedness – Scanning and Saving Important Documents – Part 2
Tags: disaster, document, flood, hurricane, important, insurance, legal, papers, saving, scan, scanning, Security, taxes, tornado, will
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