I’ve had pretty good luck the OCR software that came with the scanner (ABBYY FineReader at the time I purchased my Mac version). It gets confused about which language it’s reading when I scan a sheet with scanned check thumbnails from my bank, but other than that, the spot checking I’ve done has shown it to be very reliable.

As for Mozy, I’ve done a few test restores of a few files each which have worked fine. I have not tried to restore a whole machine (knock on wood). I’ll have to take a look at what issues others have had though. Thanks for the tip.

Regarding the comment about cross-shredding, you are absolutely right. I neglected to mention that, but without that feature document reconstruction is much easier.

- As a rule of thumb, software that ships with scanner’s isn’t the greatest. The Scansnaps are notable exceptions, but even Acrobat’s OCR struggles with non-binary or noisy documents. This will impact on the ‘findability’ of information within the documents.

(Disclosure – we sell desktop document management software, so I might be a little biased.)

- For backup, I would recommend a little caution on Mozy. If you haven’t restored a backup, you’ve not experienced Mozy. Have a Google around on restoring backups from Mozy, this was enough to put me off them. I would heartily recommend JungleDisk.

- For shredders, make sure you get a cross cut shredder.