Before purchasing software and equipment take a moment to plan what you are looking to save electronically.

If its bills, bank statements etc, you will find that many utility and financial service firms provide downloadable files. They are also working to deliver your bill/account statements via email. In these senarios the docment is already in an electronic form and should be savable without too much trouble.

As an example I currently download all my bank, credit card and other finacial data straight into Quicken. I also us it to pay bills.

For other documents see if they can be delivered electronically. For those that remain take a good hard look/think and consider if it really must be kept. A lot of what is saved (in my expirense) is of questionable value --- you end up trashing them during the yearly review/purge of your file cabinets.