Taking your stuff with you

Over the last few days, and especially the last few hours, I helped a number of retirees archive their documents, email, and files. If you are leaving the district for retirement or other reasons, here are some suggestions to make the process smooth and painless.

1. Plan ahead. You should not decide to archive gigabytes of content an hour before you plan a permanent exit. Archiving is going to take some time.
2. Cull your files before you archive. Do you really need a curriculum template from 1996 or a vendor's PDF quote from 2001? Cull, cull, cull.
3. Make one online archive. Choose a service like Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, or the next big online file hosting company that you trust to store worksheets, reference letters, quizzes, and tests. Then back up to that one resource one time. You're not backing up state secrets, so multiple backups are simply overkill.
4. If you are nervous about suggestion three, back up to a flash drive, too.
5. Don't trust flash a flash drive for long term storage. Eventually, you will misplace it, static shock it, accidentally erase it, or send it through the laundry.

Image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:George_Chernilevsky