The Epson V600 arrived in 2020 when the pandemic closed everything. My first scanning setup paired the V600 with a 2012 MacBook Pro. Once I got the correct drivers, that combo worked fine. Then, two years ago, without warning, my Mac died, and I got an M1 Mac.
Immediately, I had scanning troubles. They started with random warnings that the scanner could not communicate with the laptop. When this occurred, I would have to shut down the scanner and start over. Sometimes, the scanner would stop without warning in the middle of a frame. Naturally, I used the Epson Updater app to look for new drivers. The software reported that no updates were available, so for months, I dreaded scanning. Having to go through multiple shutdowns and restarts added a lot of extra time to each roll. Exasperated, I went looking for a solution.
After reading through multiple unhelpful posts, I found an Apple Forum post that included a link to these drivers. Now, everything works fine. I still have not figured out why the Epson Updater did not know about these driver updates.
Last year I bought, direct from Japan on eBay, an Epson GT-X980, which I’m told is the same as the V800 international version. It’s been pretty great, if the slide / neg holders could be … tighter. The trays’ male and female plastic latches (?) don’t click into place firmly, so I use a long elastic band to try and hold the three neg holders in place when I flip over the unit to fit on the scanner bed. And there are sliding plastic things at each of the four corners to vary the nearness of the negs to the glass bed, but they are easily unintentionally adjusted. They help you attain precise focus.
As for the Mac M1, I would really love one (my old Dell refurb laptop can’t play CDs without having a think every few seconds of play, though its screen is great. But like everything these days, Apple snoops too much. I don’t like that they track what we write, post, photograph. Like you, I had my late-2011 MacBook Pro fail. My TimeMachine didn’t much help. I don’t trust them now. So many scans and photos locked in that dead machine.
What i really must do is make backups to a careful and thorough extent, and know what my computer is doing. I keep finding scans vanished, probably booted out when I import RAW photo images. I do my work using Linux Mint.
The V600 negative holders are simpler than the V800’s. Mine fit fine. Aside from driver issues, it has performed very well.
The M1 Mac is fast–much faster than expected. The time required to processs scans is much faster than my old Mac. Apple offers various levels of encryption for data in iCloud on the computer. The most advanced for iCloud will encrypt all the data types you mention. However, if anything goes wrong, and you lose the keys, your data is gone for good. The computer hard drive can be encrypted as well.
When my computer crashed, I used an external drive that had Time Machine to restore my data. Between iCloud and Time Machine, I didn’t lose anything.