So my wife bought us a HP 8600 Pro printer. At first I was reluctant, but it has been quite liberating.
The main feature is that aside from the standard all-in-one printer setup it contains a multi-page, duplex, scanner feeder. Using this I was able to scan about 20 lbs of bills and important documents that I have kept around in a drawer, and store it into google docs. That means for lets say $5/year I can meet ALL my document storage needs for the next 20 years or so. I get 1 gig of space on google docs free. I doubt I can fill it up, but if I can $5/yr is damn cheap for a highly available, fully backed up service.
This is quite liberating. Basically closet space is expensive, disk space is cheap. And since google has nice data liberation I don't feel trapped by storing with them.
The only issue left is OCR and searchability. That would require a custom server, or a tool which takes your documents, OCRs them, and gives you a searchable document mechanism. But even without this, I am no worse off than before, except now it's all digital, takes up no space, no weight, no unsorted papers, it's all just there.
Another potential gain is I should split the PDF files into 10MB increments so google docs can live-preview them, and virus scan. But that is pretty much it.
Other nice things part of this printer: email printing - I get an email address with a whitelist and anyone emails sent to it from the whitelist are printed. Also google cloud print integration. This stuff is nice.
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