Digital versus hard copy

[Kev Williams]

To umm, turn a page on this discussion-- What about digitally scanning your bills, receipts and other paperwork with those things they sell on TV-- guess it's convenient to have a scanner automatically sort and file your paperwork electronically, but--- afterwards, do you throw out the paperwork? I kinda wonder what the IRS would say about being handed a flashdrive loaded with pictures of your business receipts rather than ACTUAL receipts...?

[Chris Parks]

I'm about to go on a 2 day flight and thought about buying some ebooks but they're not much good when the batteries die... So I'm sticking with old school paperbacks.

As was said earlier also. You can't lend a digital what ever. Old school has a lot of benefits.

The advantage of the Kindle is that the batteries last for weeks with constant reading as there is no HD or backlight to flatten them.

[Chris Parks]

To umm, turn a page on this discussion-- What about digitally scanning your bills, receipts and other paperwork with those things they sell on TV-- guess it's convenient to have a scanner automatically sort and file your paperwork electronically, but--- afterwards, do you throw out the paperwork? I kinda wonder what the IRS would say about being handed a flashdrive loaded with pictures of your business receipts rather than ACTUAL receipts...?

I have recently taken the step to digitise all my bills, accounts etc and junk the paper but they are household not business related. I am also considering putting a spreadsheet into each folder and as they are done adding the expense to the spreadsheet and then linking all that to a master sheet that updates automatically. I am not sure if that will work and have to investigate it a bit more but it sounds good.

[Larry Edgerton]

My wifes Bean she has been putting music in for years just died. Reason #1 to have hard copies. In the album days I always played the album once, put it on reel to reel and put it away so I always had backup.

As far as books, I have a Kindle but just use it on trips. I like reading real bools for what ever reason.

Larry

[Matt Meiser]

My wifes Bean she has been putting music in for years just died. Reason #1 to have hard copies. In the album days I always played the album once, put it on reel to reel and put it away so I always had backup.

No that's yet another of a multitude of examples I've seen proving that good backups stored in a physically separate location are critical. CDs, tapes ore vinyl certainly qualify as backups but if you store the backups electronically and you can reload a new device in minutes. Store them on cd and you've got hours of ripping ahead. Storage is dirt cheap.

[Curt Harms]

To umm, turn a page on this discussion-- What about digitally scanning your bills, receipts and other paperwork with those things they sell on TV-- guess it's convenient to have a scanner automatically sort and file your paperwork electronically, but--- afterwards, do you throw out the paperwork? I kinda wonder what the IRS would say about being handed a flashdrive loaded with pictures of your business receipts rather than ACTUAL receipts...?

That's actually a very good question. I'm pretty certain enterprises with thousands of employees don't keep paper receipts of each employee's expense account items yet those expenses are certainly deducted. I do recall reading years ago - pre 'cloud' - that it was necessary to use write once media, not re-writeable media. Beyond that I really don't know. A lot of people no longer receive mailed bank and credit card statements. Lots of billing and payment transactions are never committed to paper these days. I presume in the event of an audit that the tax people could look at the bank or credit card company's records to see if they're the same as the presented account info. I'm just guessing though.

[Matt Meiser]

I know many of the multinational corporations I've done work for, invoices go to a central location and are scanned. I don't know what happens to them after that but no one I work with ever sees the paper. Possibly they send it to someone like Iron Mountain for archiving?

7-8 years ago I was involved in developing a portal that chemical suppliers for a large automaker used to submit all their data electronically which we manipulated and loaded into a commercial environmental software package that then did the regulatory reporting. The only "paper" we ever got was MSDS sheets which data entry people loaded into an online system which was how they were available to employees of that company. I say "paper" because even then a lot of them were coming in as PDF. And we were involved in an initiative to define a standard XML schema for MSDS data. That's all highly regulated stuff and the EPA was accepting it.

[Ole Anderson]

I tend to use digital. Nothing yet has been said about photography. I guess it almost goes without saying that hard copy film based photography is almost a thing of the past with a few hold outs as with vinyl recordings. But viewing the photographs is another matter. I tend to view everything on the screen and don't bother printing anything out. But I have friends that will still have key shots printed for an album. The difference is now you will shoot a thousand pics on a trip, not just a few rolls of film.

Another item touched on is electronic billing vs getting bills by snail mail. We have converted to digital in this area as much as possible, including church contributions.

I have converted much of my music to digital for use on my Nano Ipod. I can use that tiny storage device on a plane with my noise cancelling earphones or in my car with a cable to the USB port. BUT I don't use an MP3 format, I choose a lossless format (WMA) to keep the best fidelity.

[Chris Parks]

My doctor's office is totally paperless, when you walk in they give you a tablet and you fill in a form on it.

[Brian Ashton]

The advantage of the Kindle is that the batteries last for weeks with constant reading as there is no HD or backlight to flatten them.

Ya point taken. Didn't think anything on batteries could last that long.

[Ed Aumiller]

Being an old person and involved in computers starting in 1966... data formats change... important information can be lost when updated hardware/software comes out unless you go to great pains to keep it updated to latest gizmo...
Example, tape recorded my oldest sons first sounds... went from reel to reel, to cassette, etc... even took it to floppies, etc still it is now gone...

Anything very important, may use digital to do it now, such as taxes, but keep a hard copy just in case....
Wife has probably 25000 pictures.... they scroll on our tv constantly... but I still print out the best to put in wood frames and photo albums....

A photo album of my kids 40 years ago is much more satisfying to peruse with a glass of wine than sitting in front of a screen or tv and looking at them...

Same thing for written material...

Digital is great, but if anything happens, may not be permanent enough for the irreplaceable things...

Even if material will last 1000 years, if nothing is available to read it, it is useless....

How many of you have VCR tapes recorded and no working VCR??? Or vinyl albums and no record player...???

[Chris Parks]

The preservation of digital information has (so I am told) become a real hot potato. Between new formats and hardware failure it is difficult to see how the information of today will be able to be accessed and read in a hundred years time let alone five hundred. A book can sit on a shelf and apart from dusting needs little or no maintenance but the worlds digital information is a high upkeep job which can only grow bigger. There is a lot to be said for the printed page and Guttenberg was definitely onto something.

[Chuck Wintle]

I kind of prefer the digital world. Okay, for some books that would be sacrilege, like Krenov or Nakashima, but most everything I do nowadays is on my lap top. I have a good but relatively cheap HP laptop with 4 gig memory 750 gig HDD with a 2.4 Ghz Core I3 processor, Windows 8.1. All of my music is digital, my car stereo accepts a flash drive. I also have a Kindle but lately have just put the Kindle app on my laptop and read books with it. A good example is the new Willie Nelson CD that was released last fall. My wife preordered it for my birthday and the day the CD was shipped from Amazon they automatically loaded the album onto our Cloud storage, I downloaded it and started playing it that evening. When the disc was delivered to our house I put it in my desk without opening it, still in the original plastic wrap. So what do you think of the digital world? My wife hates it for some reason, can't figure that out. She doesn't want to stream Netflix, needs hard copies for everything.

I agree that digital documents, music etc are the way of the future since the trend is sway from paper, cd's movies and all of that but when uou consider how fragile the entire digital domain is to me its a bit scary. A couple of strong EMP's can cripple the internet, destroy hard d rives and generally wipe out all data. The redundancy though can make this scenario unlikely. As one poster said printed books can still be read and understood after hundreds and hundreds of just sitting on a shelf.