When my buddy John traded in his old Windows box for a sleek new Chromebook, he quickly fell in love with Google Drive. When he added ScannerPro 7 to his iPhone there was no holding him back. Credit card statements, receipts, you name it. Last week he reported he had scanned the contents of his safe deposit box. That’s something I’d thought about but never got around to it… until today.

At my age a safe deposit box is something of a time capsule. The loan repayment schedule on your first home; the receipt for the engagement ring; draft registration card; birth certificates; high school diploma and on and on.

I’ve got it all in Google drive now (as well as in the safe deposit box). Some of you are scrambling for your keyboard to alert me to the dangers of having some of these docs in the cloud. I appreciate your concern. And your caution might be well founded.

But banks get hacked; credit card companies get hacked; the federal government gets hacked; my Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurance provided was penetrated a few years back. So all my shit is already up there somewhere. And on the really sensitive stuff, I’ve added and extra password in the the unlikely event Google gets compromised.

For me the key to this kind of task is a good scanner app and I’ve found none better than ScannerPro 7. It would have taken me three or four times longer to scan all those docs on my flatbed scanner. With the phone app, it was as fast as I could click, name and upload.