How I Digitized My Journals

I’ve been journaling all my life, beginning with a Ramona Quimby fill-in-the-blanks diary when I was six. Soon I had progressed to Meade college-ruled notebooks, and as a young adult, my series of notebooks became essentially my closest friend. I poured my heart and soul into them — all my heartaches, my random thoughts about life, my secret crushes, my tirades about being wronged, my fantasies about becoming someone better.

By now, whenever I walk through the office supplies section of a grocery store, I get a happy thrill upon seeing all the blank spiral-bound notebooks. Sometimes I flip through them just for fun. They’re so inviting! Just holding one makes my hand itch to write.

And not only writing in my journals but reading back through them has been therapeutic. Invariably, looking through what I wrote years earlier gives me new insights about myself. I’m always surprised at how little I remember of my past — there are invariably events and scenes in my journals that I would have completely forgotten if not for having written them down. There are also many things I have completely forgotten and that I’m glad to have recorded. And many of the memories have warped in my mind since they happened, so that reading my journals provides a corrective record.

In my twenties, I became fearful of losing all the precious journal-filled notebooks that I had accumulated over the years. I lived in shared housing and needed to store them in boxes in basements and storage rooms, and I shuddered to think about fires and floods. The older I became, the more it felt like my journals were a part of me, integrated into my brain. Losing them would be like having part of my memory wiped, or like losing a treasured friend: the voice, questions, and wisdom of my former, younger self. It would also be catastrophic to my work as a memoir writer.

So in my thirties I finally digitized all my journals, keeping the hard copies but also creating password-protected digital files that I store in multiple places. Now, if the worst ever happens, these most precious possessions won’t be lost. It gives me such immense peace of mind.

The digitizing process took money and time, and it would have been cheaper and quicker if I’d known what I was doing from the beginning. So I’ve written this post to explain my method, so that others might be able to tackle this kind of project more easily.

There are many other online articles (e.g., here) about digitizing your papers, journals, and other important items, but this is what I did. And once I figured out my method, it became easy and straightforward — so I recommend it as one good option for others.

A note about notebooks

As I mentioned, most of my journals over the years have been spiral-bound notebooks. It turns out these are by far the easiest notebooks to digitize, because their spiral binding can be easily unbound and rebound. Once I discovered this, I began using exclusively spiral-bound notebooks for journaling, to make digitizing easier whenever I filled up another notebook.

Notebooks with other bindings can be digitized too, and I’ve done so with the few of mine that weren’t spiral-bound. But this typically involves either painstakingly scanning every page individually, which is prohibitively time-consuming, or destroying the notebook by cutting off the binding so the pages can be fed through a scanner. The latter was the option I chose; more on that below.

Finding a scanner

I had thousands of pages of journal to scan, so I needed to use a fast, high-quality scanner with a paper feeder. A flatbed wouldn’t do — those only scan one side of the page at a time, which would mean days or weeks of me placing individual pages on the scanner and flipping them over. A paper feeder allows you to place stacks of two-sided pages into a tray, and the scanner runs them through quickly, perhaps just requiring you to stand watching and making sure the pages stay tidy.

My local library only had flatbed scanners, and the local FedEx charged a lot ($0.49 per page) for use of its scanners. Doing the calculations, I realized that because I had at least several thousand pages to scan, it would be most cost-efficient for me to simply buy my own scanner to use at home.

I went with the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500, which has since been discontinued and replaced by the ScanSnap iX1500. I chose this model because it was highly rated as a high-quality, fast scanner with a paper feeder that could handle at least 50 sheets at a time, and indeed, it has worked perfectly in the several years since I bought it. It’s currently sold on Amazon for $518. (A great way to mitigate this cost is by finding others who might want to share the scanner with you — you can make the purchase together, then rotate the scanner between your homes.)

On bindings

Once you’ve got your scanner set up, digitizing a spiral-bound notebook is incredibly easy.

You can remove the metal binding by unpinning it from itself or clipping the wire attachment and unthreading it from the pages. ( Don’t tear the pages off the binding — you want the pages’ holes intact, so you can reinsert the binding when you’re done scanning.) After you scan the notebook, you can often reinsert the metal binding you just removed, or if it’s been clipped or destroyed, you can replace it with a plastic binding coil. These are obtainable from FedEx and Amazon; my local FedEx just gives them to me for free when I ask.

Non-spiral-bound notebooks are trickier. You can leave the notebook intact and scan it on a flatbed scanner, but for me that was far too time-consuming — flatbeds take maybe 30 seconds per page, and I had hundreds of non-spiral-bound pages.

So the other option, which I chose, is to destroy the notebooks by removing their binding. I took a boxcutter or a pair of scissors and carefully carved a straightish line as close to the page edge as I could, then tore out the pages in somewhat tidy sets. They scanned just fine, and then I was left with the puzzle of how to store them. I could have punched holes in them and stored them in two- or three-ring binders, but the punched holes would have erased some of the words I’d written. I opted for the pricier option of having them professionally rebound.

Scanning & digital file storage

Before scanning a notebook, I like to write the dates of the journal somewhere on the cover, e.g., “September 1998 — October 2000.” I then make it one single PDF file, including the front and back covers so that when I open it, I get an image of the cover and it’s like I’m opening the physical journal. The dates on the cover help confirm what I’m looking at.

I label the digital file using the date and color of the notebook, sometimes also including a description of what was going on in my life at the time: “1998 Sept — 2000 Oct blue notebook (college).”

I also password protect the file.

I then store it in a few different places. I keep one copy on my computer — but that’s not my only copy, because computers can crash, and because if a fire occurred, my computer might be destroyed along with my journals. So I keep two separate backup hard drives, on which I back up my journals and all my other important files. One I store in my house separately from my computer, and the other I store at a loved one’s house. (I update both backup drives every six months or so.)

Other things I’ve digitized

My journals were my primary concern, but the process of digitizing them made me realize there were various other important items I wouldn’t want to lose in a disaster. Photos and home videos were of course at the top. Briefly, here are some resources for digitizing these other items:

• For non-digital photos and home videos, I highly recommend the service Scan Cafe, which I’ve used for all of my 35 mm photos, slides, Advantix film, and VHS and VHS-C tapes.
• For cassette tapes, I followed this article to convert sound to MP3 files using a walkman and a stereo patch cord, and used the free program Audacity as the digital interface.
• For old floppy disks, I bought an external floppy disk reader, and I sent unreadable disks to FloppyDisk.com to see if they could recover any lost content.

It’s all about peace of mind.

Ultimately, my digitizing project took me much longer than I thought it would. The journals were the easy part — I had a big, three-foot-long file cabinet drawer full of them, and it probably took me something like a week or two of full-time work to finish them all. But after that, I moved on to all of my husband’s and my photos and home videos, all my grade school art and other keepsakes, cards given to me by friends and family, and college papers. Spread out over time, the project ultimately lasted a decade!

But it gives me such peace of mind. I live in Portland, Oregon, and in the terrible fire season of 2020 when parts of my city had to be evacuated, I felt glad we had already digitized everything just in case. And there’s always the chance the Big One will hit and we’ll have to evacuate our home for months or even years! I’m so glad we’re prepared.

Originally published at http://katiesonger.com on February 4, 2022.