Best Practices for Paperless Living

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So you are thinking of going paperless, or as I like to think of it, living with less paper: Paper-less. The first thing you'll notice is how much we are dependent on paper! It's everywhere, and used for everything. Books, reports, receipts, manuals, checks, instructions, statements, contracts and more. Paper is the conveyor of information, agreements and knowledge. Until now. Now there are alternatives to paper in some areas.

Why go paperless at all? I decided to make the move to accomplish several things. I wanted to:

• Reduce the physical storage space paper was taking up
• The ability to find things easily
• Manage documents, manuals, receipts more effectively

Best Practices for Backing Up in a Paperless World

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If you are going to go paperless in your life, you best be backed up when you do. Since there's no paper backup filed away in case the hard drive fails, the building burns or the flood happens, 100% reliable backup becomes crucial.

In my quest to go paperless at home and in the office, I researched all kinds of alternatives from USB hard drives to tape to DVDs. Each had their problems with failures, difficulty of use, and practicality. For a while, I used two Maxtor 300 Gb USB hard drives. One would be online and backing up every night, the other stowed away safely in the fireproof computer media rated safe. Much to my amazement and disappointment, the drives continuously failed. After several returns and repalcements from Maxtor, I determined a) that these drives just aren't meant to be run for a week at a time every other week and b) Maxtor makes crappy drives, and finally c) perhaps this is the reason Maxtor is no more...

I also tried burning DVDs each week and storing them in the safe. This proved to be difficult to keep up with and time consuming. Backups in a paperless world are too important to do only weekly and they must be done religiously.