Category: Software

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Update to Paperless Office Post for OS X Mavericks

One of our most popular posts is Paperless Office in a Snap explaining how to set up automatic OCR of scanned documents.

With the release of Mac OS X Mavericks, the controls for Accessibility features have changed. Therefore Step 5 in the Paperless Office in a Snap post has changed. Instead of clicking Enable access for assistive devices under System Preferences – Universal Access, you now need to do the following:

Go to System Preferences – Security & Privacy – Privacy – Accessibility.

Click the checkbox to allow Folder Actions Dispatcher to control your computer as shown below.

ADDITIONAL UPDATE: This option might not show up for you until you go through the other steps in the original script and it fails. Then come back here and the checkbox option below should be available.

Security Privacy Accessibility

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Upgrading Windows HD

I recently upgraded a client’s computer from an old spinning hard drive to an SSD (solid state drive) to make the machine much faster. A simple disk clone did not work for Windows 7 to make the disk bootable. To make Windows 7 boot properly, the SID (Security Identifier) had to be updated. This is done easily using Paragon Partition Manager by just checking off the option to change the SID after performing the disk copy.

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BitTorrent Sync

If you’re looking to sync files between computers, BitTorrent Sync is a great free solution. Previously, I always recommended Dropbox, which is still a great service, especially because it is simple and it keeps a copy on the Dropbox servers, providing extra redundancy. But if you just want computer-to-computer sharing for a couple or many computers, BitTorrent Sync takes out the middleman. It’s fast, encrypted, private, and secure. It’s a great way to move very large files or to create a backup of your files on another computer. Dropbox is sometimes slow and has had security breaches.

BitTorrent Sync is still listed as experimental, but already is quite usable.

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Crashplan Offsite Backups

We frequently have clients who come to us after their computers break or are infected with a virus. Usually we are able to recover the computer files. But sometimes we can’t and all is lost if they don’t have backups. It’s a heartbreaking but frequent occurrence.  And of course, some people lose their files due to theft or natural disaster.

That’s why we recommend offsite backups in addition to a local backup. There are many good services, but we use Crashplan which is free for a year for today at: https://www.crashplan.com/carboniteswitcher/