Designed with a curvy-yet-chunky physique, the 4824FN sports a mono laser printer combined with an A4 flatbed scanner and a 30 page Automatic Document Feeder (ADF).

The paper tray can hold up to 250 sheets at a time. A second 250 sheet tray can be fitted as an optional extra, increasing the height of the device.

As with most multi-function devices, the device’s control panel extends across almost the whole width. Its mono LCD display holds 2 lines of 16 characters. The navigation disk allows for easy menu access and the panel has the standard numeric keypad for faxing. On the far right of the panel are large start and stop buttons. The Samsun also has a nice “ID Scan” button, which allows you to scan one side of an ID card, turn it over and scan the reverse, before printing boths sides on a single sheet.

The SCX-4824FN has a fairly standard port configuration, featuring USB and ethernet for PC connectivity, as well as an RJ11 socket for the fax line, and a socket for an optional handset.

Samsung has a history of writing good TWAIN drivers and the SCX-4824FN is no exception. The device works happily with Home Document Manager, and produces good quality scans.

The only gripe I can think of is that the drum and toner cartridges come in two sizes, offering either 2000 or 5000 pages, but the starter cartridge that ships with it provides only 700. It’s no secret that printer manufacturers make a lot of money on consumables – but if you print as infrequently as I do, you might find that replacing your printer to be more cost-effective than replacing your toner.

All in all, I like this device – it’s a solid addition to any small or home office. 4 out of 5.

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We’ve just released an update for Home Document Manager which introduces the concept of scanning profiles. This change should make scanning a whole lot easier.

We’ve removed the “Single Page” and “Multi page” scanning options, and replaced them with a single button with a dropdown menu. In here, we have added some pre-configured scanning profiles for the most common scan types.

Most typical documents should be scanned using the “Black & White Document” profile. This will scan the document to a black and white (binary) image at 300dpi. This is usually a high enough resolution to get good results with the OCR, but also offers a very compact file for archiving.

We also scanning to grayscale and color at 300dpi, as well as a hi-res color scan at 600dpi. Most documents do not need such profiles if we’re only interested in archiving the information.

The predefined profiles will not show you any further scanning dialogs, they will simply commence scanning. If you want to tweak the scan or use different settings, use the “Custom” profile, this will launch the familiar scanning settings interface.

We’ve also made a few other minor tweaks, like ensuring that tags and folders are always alphanumerically ordered.

As usual, no action is required on your part, Home Document Manager will update itself when an Internet connection is present.

Every hard drive ever manufactured will fail. It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when.

It’s a sobering though isn’t it? A couple of months ago, the disk in my Linux file server failed. The files I lost were not essential, but nevertheless I wish I had not lost them. Things that I had deemed irreplaceable (family photos) were already backed up, so they were safe, thankfully.

I heeded this warning and began to take stock of everything that was stored digitally, and decided whether it was sufficiently protected, or not, as the case turned out to be. From what I could see, there were two threat types. The first type was the one I had suffered, the disk failure. The second type was the catastrophic data loss resulting from flood, fire or theft.

The next step was to classify the types of things I had. There were things I would not want to lose under any circumstance; photos, development tools, operating systems, documents etc. And there were things I would not want to lose in the event of a disk failure, but wouldn’t be pressing on my mind in the event of a fire; things like movies, ebooks, music etc.

I decided to split my backup efforts in to two. Firstly, my main development desktop machine is backed up in its entirety using Acronis TrueImage. This creates an image of your hard drive for you to store some place safe. This effectively protects me from disk failure, as I can replace the disk, and reimage the machine back to it’s pre-failure state within minutes.

Whilst quick, easy and immensely powerful, Acronis can’t protect me from my house burning down. Well, it could, if I went to the trouble of creating a backup and storing it at my mother-in-law’s house. It just seems a little…well, you know.

I opted for an online backup service, but I wasn’t sure of which to choose. I’d been using Jungle Disk for about a year, but I’d been using it as an online disk, and wasn’t overly impressed with its performance.

As I’d heard many a good thing about Mozy, I thought I’d give it a try. I’d tried to use it a few months ago, but prior to Windows 7 RTM appearing, I’d been using Windows Server 2008 as my desktop OS, and Mozy block ‘personal’ accounts being used on a server OS, so I’d never really had a chance to use it.

The client’s pretty slick, and creating a backup was easy. I particularly like how it creates a snapshot of the files before uploading them. My backup (30 gigs worth) was uploading, and it had all been swimmingly easy. With Jungle Disk, getting at your files is trivial, as any of your S3  ‘buckets’ can be mounted as drives, but I was unfamiliar with Mozy’s restore procedure, so I thought I’d Google it. That was when I was sure I’d made a mistake. My search results for ‘mozy restore’ did not inspire confidence. The top 5 results featuring such pages as “It turns out Mozy isn’t so hot after all”, “Why you should avoid Mozy backups” and “Mozy Restore Sucks”.

I didn’t even let the upload complete. If this many people are having problems with Mozy, I wasn’t interested in whether it worked for me or not, I didn’t have confidence in it, and that was the end of it. I canned the upload and requested that they revert my account back to the “free” version. It took 3 days to get this response:

“Dear Valued Customer,

Your ticket has been transferred to the Customer Care Department. We are researching your request and should be able to respond within 5 business days.
If there are any extra charges during this wait time you will be refunded.”

5 days?? That would seem poor by any standard. This was 12 days ago, I’ve still not heard anything and I’m still on an “unlimited” account. I’ve just pinged a reminder – I’ll keep you posted.

Edit: They have now reverted the account for me. Loving the sense of hustle.

Edit: It gets better – they then sent me this email:

Dear ,
Your recent Support ticket Tim Haughton has been closed. Because we value your feedback, I would like to invite you to take our short Customer Satisfaction Survey. This survey should take just a few minutes to complete and your feedback will help us create a better product and customer support experience.

To take this short survey please visit the following link: Start Survey

Thank you,

null
Technical Support Representative
Customer Support

They couldn’t even be bothered to fill out my name, or the name of the representative!

So I definitely made the right call on Mozy. So, feeling burned, I remembered that JungleDisk has a backup feature. So I thought I’d give it a whirl.

The problem I had with JungleDisk was how it pitched itself. It was trying to provide a file system that is essentially a mounted bucket in the Amazon Cloud, offering limitless storage. It’s a noble and worthy aim, and I think they probably did as well as they could with it.

The problem with such ‘cloud drives’ is that as soon as you move away from having a local copy of everything, you run up against the limitations of the operating system. For example;

I back up the 2 gigabyte Windows 7 ISO image to JungleDisk. A number of days or weeks later, I browse to my ‘ISO’ folder on my mapped disk. It’s a fairly innocuous action, and what you would expect to happen is the appearance of a context menu. What actually happens, is JungleDisk commences downloading the entire 2 gig file in the background, locking Windows Explorer while it does it.

This is where it falls down. But – moving away from using JungleDisk as a disk, and instead using it as a backup utility, I am much more impressed. I create a scheduled job, tell it what and when to back up, and away it goes. It will wake my computer up if necessary and back up only the new and changed files.

I’m charged at most $0.18 per gigabyte per month. Whilst the allure of “unlimited storage” for $4.95 per month, like with Mozy, the word “unlimited” needs quite a few asterisks after it to cover the caveats. With JungleDisk, what you see is what you get.

How safe are your critical files?

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In order to read Office documents, Home Document Manager requires that you have Office installed on your machine. If you have Office 2003 installed, you will be able to import .doc, .xls and .ppt files, but you won’t be able to preview them within the app (preview wasn’t introduced until Office 2007). If you have Office 2007 installed, you’ll be able to import and preview the full range of Office docs.

Microsoft Word Support

Microsoft Excel Support

Microsoft PowerPoint Support

We’ve also added an option which allows Home Document Manager to use Adobe/Foxit PDF viewers inside the app to preview PDFs. You can enable this in the options.

Enabling 3rd Party PDF Support

3rd Party PDF Viewer

Any issues or suggestions, feel free to drop us a line.

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Image via Wikipedia

ScanSnappers who have made a rapid jump to Snow Leopard may have noticed a few, ahem, problems. It seems that there are numerous issues surrounding ScanSnap Manager and the QuickMenu support. Needless to say, the MacSnappers are all atwitter with this.

I spoke to a senior guy at Fujitsu USA yesterday, and from the sounds of it, they’re taking this very seriously indeed and are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible, although Fujitsu have publicly stated (and my contact confirmed) that it will be towards the back end of this year before a full fix will be released.

Panic ye not. Fujitsu have released a bulletin detailing what works, and what doesn’t. They’ve also issued patches which will make it easier to work around the problem. There are separate patches for the S1500M and S300M.

So, read the bulletins and install the patches. It would also be worth following @ScanSnapIT on Twitter to keep abreast of developments.

Hat tip to DocumentSnap for staying on top of it.

A quick look at the scanner’s official product page will give you the low down on its tech specs.

The scanner weighs a smidgeon over 3lbs. Pretty light for a scanner, but you’ll certainly notice it in your briefcase or bag. The 3lbs also doesn’t include the power adaptor, which is entirely optional as the scanner can be powered solely by USB. It does require 2 USB connectors to be connected however, one for power and one for data transfer. I don’t find this at all surprising, I have a portable 2.5″ hard drive that needs 3! …..I should really replace that.

The S300 supports full duplex scanning, i.e. the scan takes only one pass to scan both sides of a document. It also supports 4 scanning modes; Normal, Better, Best and Excellent. Scanning speeds vary from Colour (150dpi) or B&W (300dpi) at 8ppm (16 sides per minute) to Colour (600dpi) or B&W (1200dpi) at 0.5ppm. For most archival purposes, B&W at 300dpi gives you a small file size with high OCR accuracy.

The S300 supports PDF only as its output file type. This means if you’re looking for a photo scanner, you should perhaps look elsewhere, but it is ideally suited to paperless home/office/car environments.

As with all ScanSnaps, the lack of a TWAIN driver means that you are restricted to using the bundled ScanSnap software to capture your document. I’ve been talking to an engineer at Fujitsu over the last week to see what software vendors like myself can do. The ScanManager software features what they refer to as “Scan Profiles”, these are predefined settings for a type of scan. In order to get a Scansnap to work with another application like Home Document Manager, a user has simply to configure a “Home Document Manager” profile which deposits the PDFs in to a folder. The user needs then to configure Home Document Manager to monitor this folder. The snag is that this isn’t currently supported, but last night’s release clears the decks for this, so it is my next priority and would hope to have it in place within a week or so.

I will post an update with instructions when this is ready.

The ScanSnap also has built in OCR functionality. It will slow your scan down, but a document needs to be OCR’d somewhere. The OCR quality is comparable to Home Document Manager’s OCR, so it’s really a matter of preference whether you let the S300 take care of OCR, or leave it to Home Document Manager.

All in all, if you need either a small and/or portable scanner, you would be hard pressed to top the S300.

The S510 is not without its problems, however. The scanner ships with an impressive software bundle, but the lack of TWAIN and WIA drivers means that you either like the software bundle it comes with, or you lump it. I’m not sure of Fujitsu’s logic, but the Scansnaps will not work  with other software applications (like Home Document Manager, OneNote etc). This isn’t Fujitsu’s policy across their entire scanner range, but it does seem to be the case across all Scansnaps.

Technologically, the scanner is sound. But it is let down by the fact that you have work work the way they want you to work, rather than how you want to work. The software bundled also boasts the ability to output the scanned documents directly to Word or Excel files. Whilst this sounds good in theory, the resulting documents contain so many errors that it ends up being frustrating rather than useful.  There are also many reports of users failing to get the scanner to work on Vista 64 bit, which, again, is a glaring hole.

All in all, I’d have to give it 3 out of 5. It would have scored higher, but restricting users to a particular way of working is not acceptable. We paperless enthusiasts take our systems very seriously, and who are Fujitsu to say they know better.

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The first thing that struck me in comparison to the Draper dinosaur that I’d just marched out of the office, was the quality of construction. It feels solid, more like a complete unit than the flimsy Draper. The shredder sits securely atop a decent sized bin.

There is a power switch on the back of the unit, as well as an auto/off/reverse switch on top. There is also a pretty decent safety switch on top to stop little fingers playing with it – especially useful if like me, your office is in the family home. According to the safety symbols on top, things not to put through it include children, hands, hair, ties and aerosols.

The cutters function very well. It can handle between 6 and 8 pages at a time, and copes just fine with staples and even credit cards. I managed to find an old credit card to give it a whirl, it demolished it entirely, cutting it into the same sized strips (3.9mm x 50mm) that the shredder creates of paper.

The only possible criticisms are that it would be nice if it were a smidgeon quieter. It would also be good if it would come with a small starter bottle of oil.

You can pick these up in the UK for between £30 and £40 and between $60 and $70 in the US.

All in all, 4 out of 5. A good purchase.

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