The first thing I do whenever I receive any kind of important document is to scan it and save it in both my portable hard disk as well as on the cloud. Of course, I take the precaution to encrypt these documents to prevent them from falling in the wrong hands. This way I have successfully backed up all my educational documents, professional documents, income tax papers and other personal documents. I am in the habit of saving these documents in both the JPEG image format as well as the PDF format. This is because while the JPEG documents are easy to browse through in any image viewer, the PDF documents give better results when you try to print them.
If you want to scan your documents into the PDF format or just save them as JPEG images, then you can use an open source software called Not Another PDF Scanner (NAPS). This is a portable software (but does depend on .NET framework), that can use any TWAIN or WIA supported scanner device to scan your documents and save them as JPEG or PDF files. It basically works with all the multi-function printers that have a scanner bed and standalone scanner devices.
The first thing you have to do with NAPS is to create a profile. The profile is useful if you have more than two scanner devices attached to your computer or you want to use different page size, color depth, resolution etc., for different types of documents. In any case, you can click on the Scan button the first time you use NAPS and it will ask you to create a new profile. You can also manage your profiles by clicking on the Profiles button in the toolbar.
After scanning is finished, all the documents will appear as thumbnails in the NAPS window. You can select one or more of these documents and choose to save them as PDF files by clicking on the Save PDF button. All the selected documents are saved in the same PDF file. You can also choose the scanned documents as images by clicking on the Save Images button. Furthermore, you can also save them as PDF and email it to your friends or other acquaintances.
Conclusion: NAPS or Not Another PDF Scanner is a useful and productive tool to scan and convert your documents into PDF files or JPEG images. It works with all the scanner devices that support either the TWAIN or WIA interface to scan.
You can download Not Another PDF Scanner from https://github.com/cyanfish/naps2/releases.