How to digitize your most important documents — without getting overwhelmed

With wildfires, floods and other emergencies all too common of late, it's worth asking, if you had to leave your home in a hurry, would your important documents be easy to grab and take with you?

Canada's Emergency Preparedness Guide recommends making copies of important documents — like birth and marriage certificates, passports, licences, wills, land deeds and insurance paperwork — and keeping them in a safe place both inside and outside of your home. You could put them in a safety deposit box or give them to friends or family who live out of town. That way, you have a backup in case the originals are destroyed, damaged or have to be left behind.

And in addition to having physical copies, you may want to make digital versions as they can be easier to access in an emergency. But let's face it, organizing and scanning all those papers can feel overwhelming, and it's tempting to put it off.

To help you get started, we asked archivist June Chow and digitization expert Jeff Marceil for tips on everything from image size to naming your files, so you can finally get organized and rest easy, knowing you're prepared.

Use a scanner

While your phone camera and document-scanning apps may be convenient, both experts strongly recommend using a scanner for best results. A photo of a document is better than nothing, but could be missing important details due to resolution, tone or hue, and might not be sufficient for government bodies like the Canada Revenue Agency.

Chow​, an ​archivist with the Toronto Reference Library, says a flatbed scanner is a good investment, but you may be able to use one for free at a public library. You can specify the resolution, file type and other details for each document, and you won't have to worry about lighting issues like you would when you're taking a photo.  

Of course, if you're short on time or have boxes of documents or photo prints you want scanned, there are businesses that can do this quickly and accurately for a fee. 

Think about format and resolution

The first step is to determine if what you're digitizing is text or images — and if it's worth the time and effort to scan, store and manage the files.

"Don't try to digitize everything just because the technology exists and is available," Chow said.

Marceil — a project manager at Micro Com Systems, which specializes in document scanning and data capture for businesses in B.C. — suggests scanning documents at 300 DPI (dots per inch), and photos at 600 DPI. "As far as legibility [for documents], if you go higher, you're just creating [a] larger file size," he said. "It gets a little bit better, but not enough to justify the higher file size."

Also, scanning your documents in black and white and saving the files as a PDF (recommended for most documents) or a TIFF using Group 4 compression will keep the original image data intact while often taking up less space on your hard drive. "A lot of times people scan things in colour, and it's just then you're using JPEG compression, and it's not as good," Marceil said. "[Group 4 compression] is also considered a lossless compression, which means … when you [open the file], there's no loss of the image quality."

Of course, it all depends on what you're using the digital files for. "When we do digitization for preservation, it's done at high resolution [and] often results in TIFF file formats and very big files," Chow said. But if you want a file that is quick to open and easy to share, consider saving your images as JPEGs, which are smaller and suitable for viewing on a screen.

Finally, if you're scanning a document that's several pages long, Marceil suggests creating a multi-page PDF rather than scanning each page individually. "Even the cheapie big-box-store scanners, they've got software that'll allow you to create a multi-page … file," he said. Some scanning software uses optical character recognition (OCR) to make printed documents searchable — handy when you need to find a specific receipt. 

Use logical naming conventions

"However you are searching for your documents now — whether it's alphabetical order or numerical order or by subject or something like that — in the digital world, you should save things pretty much the same way," Marceil said. "Because when you end up with thousands of files or thousands of documents, you want to name them something logical so that you'll be able to find them later." 

For example, if you're digitizing personal documents for your family, the names of the files for each person could start with their first name so that everything is automatically grouped together in the folder. Or for all paperwork related to a specific property, the file names could start with the address or street name. 

Store your digital documents in a safe place and in multiples

Ideally, you want to make a few copies of each file and store them in different places and on different platforms. "It's not an issue of storing files on the cloud versus your computer hard drive versus a CD — it's actually all of them," Chow said. "It's an and-and-and relationship." Just be sure to use encrypted folders and require a password for sensitive documents.

Chow says creating a digital copy protects valuable records and documents against loss or damage. But remember to update your digital records as your physical documents expire or are replaced.