Fwd: OT: going paperless?

Tom Purl tom at tompurl.com
Thu May 24 11:38:32 EDT 2007


On Wed, May 23, 2007 9:51 pm, Tim reid wrote:

> Has anyone converted over to all electronic banking/finances?  do you
> receive all your statements through email?

Yes!

> What are the pros?  cons?

The pros are that your files are easier to find and store.  I'm a huge
fan.  And we all know that we're much more likely to keep up with our
bookkeeping duties if it's easy to find and work with our financial
docs.

There are some things you'll need to consider, however:

0. Network Security

You'll really want to at least set up a decent firewall if you do this,
since it's much easier to break into most computers than it is to break
into most houses.

1. Encryption

As an added layer of security, you may want to look into encrypting
either the financial files individually (using OpenSSH or GPG) or the
partition in which they're stored.  Personally, I like using Truecrypt
to encrypt a small partition that stores all of my super-personal
information, although it can be a bit flaky at times.  There are lots of
options for encrypting a partition on Linux, so find one that works for
you.

2. Backups

To me, this is a deal-breaker.  If you don't have a decent, somewhat
reliable way to back up your financial docs, then you simply shouldn't
be storing them exclusively on your machine.  I personally use rsnapshot
to do daily, incremental backups of my /home partition that is stored on
a separate hard drive and am very happy with the results.

HTH!

Tom Purl




More information about the gnucash-user mailing list