Paperless Mac

Earlier this week I posted how to get OCR with Evernote on your mac, but unless you are willing to pay for the pro account, this excludes PDFs.  There is a workaround for this issue if you happen to have Adobe Acrobat (full version – Amazon link) installed on your mac.  Jump over to DocumentSnap for their clever tutorial on how to OCR PDFs before loading them into Evernote.

Now that you have your ScanSnap and Evernote playing nicely together on your mac, maybe you’re asking yourself what’s the point.  Well, Evernote is a very powerful piece of software that will make your scanned documents available across multiple computers as well as your smartphone.  This alone is great, but Evernote’s real power is that it performs OCR on your scanned documents and makes them searchable (this even works on handwritten notes).  For me, whenever I get a paper statement/bill in the mail, a store receipt or anything worth keeping I immediately scan it into Evernote (and tag it), shred the original and forget about it.  With the ScanSnap and Evernote paired, these steps are a breeze and the process has done wonders to reduce my desktop clutter.  To top it all off, Evernote is free (unless you want the pro account).

The one catch with Evernote is that OCR is only performed on pdf documents if you pay for the pro account;  there is a simple workaround though.  If you are poor like me, and don’t want to pay the $45 annual fee for the pro account, simply set up a profile to scan into Evernote as jpeg, not pdf.  The free Evernote will OCR jpeg, no problem.  There is just one issue I’ve found with scanning in images instead of pdf and that is that each scanned page is its own image.  Evernote lets you combine notes though, so scan in a multiple page document as jpeg, select them all in Evernote and then right click and select merge notes from the menu.  Viola!  One final note on the OCR feature.  It is performed on the Evernote servers, so you must set your notebook to sync in order to OCR the text and make it searchable.  Shortly after a document has been uploaded, Evernote will download data from the server and you can search.  Good luck and have fun clearing off your desk.

As I mentioned in my Tools of the Trade post, Evernote is one of the workhorses in my paperless office.  It took me a little while to figure how to get it working seamlessly with my other workhorse, the ScanSnap 300m, because the instructions I found online were a little misleading.  If you go to the Evernote blog, they explain how to use a twain-compliant scanner with Evernote on the mac.  Unfortunately, this is not how the 300m works.  If you attempt to use those instructions, you won’t get to far because Image Capture will not recognize the ScanSnap and just leave an error message up that states “No Image Capture device connected.”

Do not fret though, it is simple to get the ScanSnap and Evernote working in harmony.  The first thing you must do is ensure that you have the latest ScanSnap Manager installed, which you can find on the Fujisu website.  At the time of this post, the most recent version is V22L11 – and I can confirm this version works.  Once installed, you must make a simple change.  With the ScanSnap Manager running, right-click on the icon in the dock and unselect “Use Quick Menu.”  Now you will be able to use profiles, which are a much more powerful way to utilize Evernote anyway.  Now that you have disabled the quick menu, you must add Evernote as an application that the ScanSnap Manager can recognize.  Once again right-click on the dock icon and open up Settings….

In the Application tab, click the Add or Remove … button and select Evernote from you Applications directory.  Once you complete this, click the drop-down at the top of the ScanSnap Manager where it says “Select a Profile:”  In this menu you can add a profile called Evernote.  Make sure the Evernote is selected in the Application drop-down and select any options in the other tabs you require and then save the profile by hitting the Apply button.

This completes the setup portion, now all you need to do is left-click on the ScanSnap icon in the dock and a menu will pop up with all your profiles, select the Evernote profile from the list (which will remain the default until changed).  Now whenever you hit the button to scan on the 300m, it will scan directly into Evernote!  If you have any other Evernote / ScanSnap tips, please drop me a line in the comments below.

I recently upgraded an external drive of mine and sold the old one on ebay.  I tend to repurpose old drives until they are out-dated to the point that nobody would want them and then physically destroy them.  Initially, I was concerned about selling my drive to a stranger because I figured there would be a way they could recover my data, and in fact, there most certainly are ways to recover data “deleted” on a hard drive.  Fortunately, since 10.3, Apple has included in Mac OS, a built-in feature called “Secure Empty Trash” that ensures deleted files cannot be recovered.  This feature can be accessed by going to Finder > Secure Empty Trash.  This process takes longer to complete than the standard empty trash, but especially for sensitive files, it is worth it.

So what should you do if you haven’t been using Secure Empty Trash all along and need to securely wipe a drive?  There are two main options on the Mac.  The first is another Mac OS built-in feature accessible through Disk Utility (located in Applications/Utilities/).  Select the disk you would like to secure, then select the Erase tab.  Within this tab there is a “Erase Free Space…” option.  Here you can select the number of times you want to zero out the free space on your disk.  Depending on the number of times you select and the size of your free space, this can be a lengthy process, so plan appropriately.  The other option is to use Permanent Eraser, an open source solution to this problem.  I’ve never used this due to the convenience of the built-in Apple solution.  Please leave a comment on your experience if you’ve used Permanent Eraser.

Remember, if you’re going to get rid of a hard drive, be sure to securely wipe the device so that you aren’t giving someone an opportunity to access your personal information.  A recent informal survey indicated that 40% of drives sold on ebay had readily accessible information contained on them.  Be smart, securely erase!