Digial file cabinet - you're such a tease

Lifehacker posted a link to this article from the NYT where some Google employee is proudly going paperless in his home.

CHRIS UHLIK’S children can be found in their home computer lab almost every morning. Nicole is writing a story about her two lizards. Tony is playing an interactive spelling game, while Andy is learning multiplication tables. Even 5-year-old Joceline is clicking away at a storybook game.

Mr. Uhlik, an engineering director at Google, and his family live a practically paper-free life. The children are home-schooled on computers. Other sources of household paper — lists, letters, calendars — have become entirely digital.

Going paperless was a conscious decision by the Uhliks. But many families may be closer to entering a paperless world than they realize. Paper-reducing technologies have crept into homes and offices, perhaps more for efficiency than for environmentalism; few people will dispute the convenience of online bill-paying and airline e-tickets.

“Paper is no longer the master copy; the digital version is,” says Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library. “Paper has been dealt a complete deathblow. When was the last time you saw a telephone book?”

Sexy, and yet - I'm wondering about two things.

• Who has the time to convert all their paper to digital files (much less searchable, digital files)?
  
  
• Are scanned legal documents as acceptable as the originals?

I would LOVE to get all my files into a hard drive (and Carbonite them for safe keeping) but cripes, talk about a conversion issue.

This article mentions a firm in India that will scan all your docs for you at ($0.40 per page) but think about that for a second: I'll send my originals to India? I don't think so.

Make copies to send to India - I might as well scan them myself.

Scanning the non-legal documents seems like a good move, though - I'd be nice if there was some hardware/software integration to make that workflow better.

e.g. Scan document - be presented with a list of tags to apply to it (finance, reciept, etc) and then the system would dump the file where ever you'd previously told it to store documents that have 'Receipt'. You'd be able to enter meta-data on it as well.

Receipt-Lawnmower, 02/18/2008 - that sort of thing.

Oooh, but I want this. I wonder if somebody's already made this...