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| You Look Marvelous! |
Not that I haven't been working, many of you know I host the weekly edtech Twitter chat #PATUE and recently have been building out the PATUE.org website. I have also been working to keep up with my EDUawesome co-hosts on the TechEducator's podcast, now available on Itunes. And last but not least I have been prepping to shift to a different school, and a different laptop platform.
The end of the school year is always a slightly overwhelming tsunami of papers, response, and packing. My classroom is always repurposed over the summer. This year I have to pack up everything in my office as well, and to make things interesting I am starting a summer gig in Las Vegas the day after graduation at the school in Palo Alto. Drive time between the two school is 8.5 hours.
One of the biggest challenges has not been packing up over 10 boxes of poetry, literature and photography books, it has been finding and retrieving all of my files fromt he school server. So just when you were sure this post had no useful point, let's talk about data portability.
Data Storage, what needs saving?
A confession: I am a data pack rat. I have over 100Gb of word files on the school server some of which date back to my previous job, some go all the way back to college. I don't ever look at these files. I don't use them for anything, or at least I have not used them YET. and Yes I have 7 linear feet of binders and notebooks of my past writing I also never look at.
While I acknowledge that my unwillingness to through my past work away might qualify me as an EDUhoarder, this is not about to change. My only compromise has been that I am not saving the source video files from the video I made this year, as they were over 200 GB on their own and if I haven't created a produced product out of them yet it just isn't going to happen.
To Cloud or Not to Cloud?
So my files are landing in one of 3 places, Google Drive (5gb), Dropbox (6.5 GB) or my Seagate GoFlex Drive (1TB). How do I decide what goes where? Here is what I have settled on. My Dropbox account is full to capacity with video I need to process, mostly from this weekend's animal rescue fundraiser with Sounds of Silent Spirits. The Dropbox is an active working location.
Google Drive has all of my active text files, from english assignments to chat scripts most of everything I have been working on this year is already in Gdrive. I am trying not to mess with this too much, but I will also be migrating the non-video files on my laptop over to Drive.
Everything else I am parking on my Seagate 1TB drive, almost 300GB of I don't know what, pulled from my yearly backup files on the school server. A quick glance tells me I might have 2 or 3 copies of many of these files. I hope to find a program to help me audit this drive over the summer. If you know of a good way to do this, I am all ears.
The particulars of formatting my external drive and moving back to a PC after my year of living on a mac will make a great post of its own soon. I have to wrap this up as my last 9th graders are finishing their last English final, so I have more grading to do. Thanks for reading.
Comments
It fascinates me how we organize so much data, some folks quite organized and timely with it, others organically developing a system as the data grows, and then others (like I was) having so much data across many CD's, old laptops, cloud, and even borrowed school server space (shh!). Best wishes with the transfers and end of year.