How can I make these files portable

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I have an iMac running Snow leopard and I am very satisfied with it, so I am not in the market to buy a new laptop computer .

However, I have a couple of hobbies that I have done for many years and I have collected hundreds of patterns and tutorials for them. I find it very cumbersome to bring the project to my computer desk so I need to print them. I have 16 binders where I have the paper copies and they are taking up valuable real estate in a small apartment

I would like to save all of the hobby patterns and tutorials to flash drives and be able to plug them into an iPad, iPod, tablet, Kindle or some thing portable ..

I have done some research and unless I have missed something none of these portable pieces of equipment have USB ports ( for a Flash drive or external CD player ) or a slot for a memory card.

I even considered a cheap brand of laptop just for this purpose. I would not hook it up to the Internet just use is to display patterns from my Flash drives . However, I am not sure what format I would need to save the files in to work on a computer other than an Apple.
Would I need to buy Office for Mac?

Any suggestions or links to where I can get additional information on this idea would be deeply appreciated .
Thank you
Barbara
 

chscag

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I even considered a cheap brand of laptop just for this purpose. I would not hook it up to the Internet just use is to display patterns from my Flash drives . However, I am not sure what format I would need to save the files in to work on a computer other than an Apple. Would I need to buy Office for Mac?

You could save all your files to the FAT-32 format as that will allow them to be read on any computer (Mac, PC Windows, Linux). As long as no single file exceeded 4 GB, FAT-32 is the way to go.

And you're correct about mobile devices not having a USB or SD card slot to insert for additional storage. You might consider purchasing an inexpensive small PC notebook computer. I have seen them at Best Buy and other places for less than $250 brand new.
 

Slydude

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I'm using an iPad for this at the moment though I don't have as many on there as you would. At the moment it consists of manuals etc. for various pieces of gear. If I need a certain piece of information no rummaging through the drawer for manuals.

The one possible problem for you would be the time needed to scan the files and convert them to pdf. The number of projects which fit on an iPad would of course depend upon the size of each file and capacity of the iPad (or similar device). I've been threatening to do this fort some of my wife's sewing/quilting magazines/patterns.
 
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Whew I am not the only one with this problem. I keep the manual , receipt and warranty for everything . I never thought of scanning those too .
It didn't appear to me there was a USB port or Memory card slot so did you just saved them directly to the iPad ? You were not first saving them to another media storage tool such as a Flash Drive or Memory card

My second reason for wanting to put them on portable storage media is I can easily take a pattern to a class on a Flash drive . Everyone I know has a PC.

I Googled how to format a Flash drive to FAT-32 and it said most are already formatted that way. Have you found that to be true?
That makes sense since we don't buy a Flash Drive or Memory card specifically for a PC or a Mac.
There was another thread on how to format it in Disk Utility . I will go that route if I find they are not formatted out of the blister pack

The weather in Wisconsin has awful so this would be a great time to tackle a time consuming project like scanning and saving hundreds of files . :)
I think I will check out some cheap PC laptops .
Thanks !!
Barbara
 

Slydude

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The manuals I have done so far were already in pdf format and found on the net so I didn't have to scan them. I added them to my iTunes library and transferred them to the iPad that way as "books". I have not started scanning the wife's sewing patterns yet. I'm hoping I can manage to create "searchable" pdfs most of the magazines contain several patterns per issue.

If you have too many to fit on a device at one time would it be a big inconvenience to load groups of patterns needed. That should be relatively easy to manage in iTunes. Add the patterns to the library and select the ones to sync by checking them. When new patterns are needed select and sync those.

Initial setup might be time consuming due to scanning the files but after that not too bad.
 
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The manuals I have done so far were already in pdf format and found on the net so I didn't have to scan them. I added them to my iTunes library and transferred them to the iPad that way as "books". I have not started scanning the wife's sewing patterns yet. I'm hoping I can manage to create "searchable" pdfs most of the magazines contain several patterns per issue.

If you have too many to fit on a device at one time would it be a big inconvenience to load groups of patterns needed. That should be relatively easy to manage in iTunes. Add the patterns to the library and select the ones to sync by checking them. When new patterns are needed select and sync those.

Initial setup might be time consuming due to scanning the files but after that not too bad.

If you send them to iTunes first and then down load them as needed how will you keep things together, such as patterns from a specific magazine issue or isn't that important to your wife.

I have my files set up by the main topic and then the designer's name . This way if I am looking for a pattern that I know was designed by Anneke I know where to find it .
If you discover a way to create "searchable " PDF's will you let me know how you did it ?

The only thing that unnerves me is devises such as hard drives, external hard drives or portable media devises can fail . Will I have the courage to toss the paper files when I am finished loading them onto Flash Drives ?? :eek:
I have an external hard drive back up.
Barbara
 

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I had not really thought too much about that yet. I was still working lout how to make sure the content within a given pdf was searchable (searching within a specific issue/article for example. The closest idea I have come up with is that the articles would have to be scanned and run through OCR software otherwise they are treated as graphic images making it impossible to search text within an article.

My initial thought when I first conceived this was to group issues together using the tagging features in iTunes. Just as the "artist' field can be used to keep music by a given artist together patters by a given designer could be kept together by entering the designers name in a similar field for pdfs. The sort "album" in the sort tab could house the name of the magazine for example thus keeping collections intact

Now that Apple has [URL="http://pastorhart.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/ipad-tip-organizing-pdfs-with-ibooks/"]shifted some aspects of pdf management to iBooks
I am going to re-think the best way to handle these situations. Either way I think the bulk of the pain in the rear factor will be getting good OCR scans if one wants to search text of any articles.

BTW One thought about Flash drives. They don't solve the problem of searching the text of the patterns if that's important to you. The scanned file would still be a picture of the page and not searchable. Mind if I ask what kinds of patterns you are working with (knitting, sewing etc.)?
 
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All that's really needed here is a cloud storage account with a half-decent amount of space. I use copy.com for this purpose -- you can sign up for 15GB free, or get 20GB if you'd like to use my referral code https://copy.com?r=lQ6l1p. Now your document is available on any Internet-connected device, and can be pre-downloaded and stored on any of said devices if you're going to be somewhere without a connection.
 

Slydude

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That's an idea I hadn't considered. I was still at the level of trying to figure out the mechanics of getting the files / patterns into some machine-readable form. The ones I have done so far have been easy because the manuals I've been working with were already in pdf files on the manufacturer's website. I doubt that's true for many of the patterns Barbara Jay wants to store / use.
 

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There are plenty of mobile devices that have expandable storage if you'd rather go this route. I believe many of the Galaxy Tabs have SD slots as does something like the Sony Tablet Z. There are also a host of Windows 8 tablets that likely have expandable storage. Cloud solutions also work which let you use any tablet.
 
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@Barbara Jay . . . I wouldn't hesitate to say that 99+ percent of USB flash drives are formatted FAT-32 right off the shelf/blister pack. Again, please keep in mind the largest single file it will store is 4GB. That should be no problem with the patterns you deal with. Setting up a folder on the flash drive is simple and, as mentioned, you can store the online receipt, pdf manual, instructions, template/pattern, and any code or product key for future reference to downloads/updates. And as far as any type of file storage, redundancy is the key word. Anything of importance should be backed up in more than one place and/or device. All storage devices i.e. flash drives, ext hdd, internal hdd, CD/DVD's can and will fail.
Apple offers an excellent array of Office type applications...my advice to you is to invest in MS Office just to ensure compatibility between various computers and operating systems. Maybe something I have said here will help.
 

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