Archive for the ‘Utilities’ Category
Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M
Just got a Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M scanner. I got this to get rid of the mountain of paperwork that is piling up on my desk.
Setup was supremely easy, basically get all of the bits from the box, through away the US power plug and install the software. Three CD’s later I had Adobe Acrobat, an OCR app, and the ScanSnap manager software. The Adobe Acrobat update software ran the first time I opened Acrobat and that took ages to install.
The use of the scanner is incredibly easy. The scanner automatically turns on when you open the front of the scanner. Insert your document (upside down) and press the scan button, and the software is automatically invoked on the computer. The scanning is super quick, the pages spitting out in a couple of seconds.
The only hiccup I have had so far is that my older desktop computer is a bit slow to perform the OCR functions, and more often than not I am waiting for the computer to catch up with the scanning. An error dialog popups if you scan to quickly.
Apart from constantly thinking that it is a SnapScan instead of ScanSnap I have found it to be an excellent machine. It works intuitively and is really easy to use. The pile of documents is decreasing rapidly!
Trick with Self Image on Windows
We have been testing making drive images made with Self Image and found that you have to make sure that you created an entire drive image when creating an image.
If you make an image of a partition then it is likely that you won’t be able to get all the parameters exactly the same on the new partition. If you have an image of the entire drive then you will restore the all of the partitions and boot settings etc. Much easier as long as your target drive is bigger than the drive that was backed up.
Open Source Backup Utilities for Windows
I needed to find some decent backup utilities for the office. We wanted to have a program that would perform a daily backup and FTP the files off site. The other necessecity is to be able to backup and restore the entire machine quickly.
Found two good products, Cobian Backup and Self Image. Both products are open source.
Cobian backup met the criteria for backing up the files on a regular basis. It is able to perform diff backups, compress the output, and send the results to a remote FTP location. It will even deletes older backups on the remote site so you don’t run out of disk space. Unfortunately a recent post by the developer on the Cobian site says that he will abandon his software if someone doesn’t take over the project lead.
Self Image is imaging software that is able to make a disk image of a running Windows machine. The idea here is if the hard drive fails in one of the machines this will enable us to get the machine up and running with a minimum of fuss. Finally if the machine has failed it needs a host system to restore the image. Self Image is now included on the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows.