Ix500 / ScanSnap Cloud / iCloud

Tech Support
1

Hi Fellow MPU Fans,
I have had an ix500 for several years - love it. However, I find myself increasingly annoyed that there is no way to directly upload scans to iCloud. We’re a laptop family, so there’s no dedicated machine always hooked up to the scanner and that makes it easier to just have it go directly to scansnap cloud. I used to have a kludgy solution of uploading to google drive and using the google drive backup package to sync to my local drives, which would in turn get those files up to iCloud. But ever since google updated their google drive backup software recently (I think in the last year or so), I’ve learned that that it completely messes up macOS file indexing…which is a huge problem.

Does anyone have any creative, but not too messy, ways to get scansnap documents into iCloud?

Ryan
626.260.3796

2

Is there not a way in the Scansnap software to make the target location of the scanned file to be the local disk copy of the cloud synch?

1 Like
3

that is possible, but I don’t want it to be tied to one computer since we are a multi-user household and not all computers are necessarily in the house at all times. e.g. if I’m gone and my wife wants to scan something, I want it to go up to our shared iCloud folder and vice versa. Does that make sense?

4

so the shared icloud folder system is is not synced to the machine with the scanner?

5

You need an Apple to get access to the iCloud.

6

Have you given any thought to buying a refurb M1 Mac mini? You could leave it connected headless for this particular need. There are also some other great benefits to having an always on Mac in your network: Plex, caching, remote access, etc.

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7

I’ll second this suggestion. If you also have Hazel (easiest to use) you can scan to the Mac mini which then moves the file to the iCloud folder.

Note that any old Mac mini will do. It doesn’t have to be an M1.

While I don’t have my ScanSnap scans go to iCloud, they go to the server via Hazel. And I also do an opposite process. When I scan from my iPhone, it stores to iCloud, then Hazel on the server watches that iCloud folder and moves the scans to the server computer.

3 Likes
8

Thanks. This would definitely work, but it feels like such a headache to run an entire separate machine just to get scans to upload to iCloud - I guess I was hoping there was some secret way to make ScanSnap Cloud talk to iCloud, but I think it’s not in the cards

9

I’m sure if you had an always-on Mac you would find more uses for it than just this! Look at the various threads about servers here.

10

Hi - it’s now some years later and I’m still scractching my head with this problem. I actually purchased a mac mini to use as a family computer and to serve as my always-on computer for scansnap. Now the problem I’m running into is that you seem to have to be always logged in so that the scansnap can actually save to the folder. Not to mention having multiple users on the system means you have to be logged in to the right account.

Has anyone figured out how to make this work? Oh, how I wish it would just connect directly to iCloud so I could bypass the computer entirely…

11

Well the trick is that the always-on “server” computer needs to be dedicated to that function and not be the family computer. The good news is that any used, base model mini made in the past 5 or so years will work fine as a server. It does not need a keyboard, mouse, or display, as you can log into it as needed using Screen Sharing.