Backup Your Handwritten Lecture Notes Before You Lose Them Forever

What if someday if you lose or accidentally damaged your handwritten lecture notes?

The essential details and hints that the lecturer is going to use on the exams and countless hours you spend to make the perfect notes so you can study them later will be gone, and you won’t be able to access them ever again. Have you ever thought about this?

As you already know, hundreds of backup services and apps exist to protect critical computer data as well as programs to recover lost documents and files. But when it comes to your handwritten notes, is there at least one option available?

There are manual ways to recover your lecture notes if you’ve spilled coffee or something on lecture notes. But still, you may have to re-write them all over again. Backing up your handwritten lecture notes is the best solution even if it is going to take some time to do so.

How to Back Up Hand-Written Lecture Notes 

Solution 1 – Scanning and Storing the Documents in Your Computer (Takes a lot of time)

Scanning all your lecture notes using a mobile pdf scanner app can be time consuming and tiresome. However, using a scanner with an automatic document feeder feature can simplify the task for you, and you could save a lot of minutes scanning documents using a scanner.

Although a scanner like that will cost won’t be in every student’s price range. Both methods can be time-consuming, and it takes forever to find some crucial details like something you need for the exam you have tomorrow.

So, scanning your lecture notes using a mobile pdf scanner app or using a scanner with an automatic document feeder is not the recommended solution to backing up your lecture notes.

Solution 2 – Scan and Archive Lecture Notes Using Evernote or OneNote (Recommended)

If you don’t like to waste your time scanning all your lecture notes (when you have 100 or more pages) or if you can’t afford a scanner? Here is the most recommended method to back up all of your lecture notes.

Other than using an expensive scanner, you could use a digital note-taking app like Evernote or OneNote. Scanning your hand-written notes takes time, but when you need to find something, you just have to search for it in the app. This method, however, can cost you a few bucks, and it’s worth it and affordable to anyone, especially students.

Also, you get access to more features such as sorting content, highlighting important details, inserting recorded audio notes and online videos, clippers to save content on the cloud or your computer, and even sharing features.

OneNote

The best thing about OneNote is it is accessible on any platform such as Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and even in Windows mobile. You can search and edit the text in your notes as well as extract text from images or pdfs using OneNote since it has optical character recognition.

Most of all, OneNote has a free version, which should be enough, especially for a student. You can choose to pay for an additional OneDrive space or a Microsoft Office subscription.

Evernote

Evernote is available on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOs. Evernote has every feature that OneNote including optical character recognition, but it is not as powerful as OneNote’s features. So, in Evernote, you can only search text in your uploaded notes. You cannot search text in images or edit the uploaded notes.

Evernote also has a free Basic plan, but it has a monthly upload limit, and most features won’t be available. Evernote’s premium plan, which costs $7.99 per month, is worth it if you can afford it. Otherwise, you could use the basic plan, which is more than enough for a student.

The Conclusion – How to Backup Hand-Written Notes 

Losing hand-written notes can make you lose marks on your exams since it could mess up your revision time. So, it is recommended to keep digital backups of your hand-written notes. You have the option to keep backups on your computer or backup your notes using an app like Evernote or OneNote.