Establishing a system of organization early on for your materials will help when it comes time to do your e-Portfolio. The following is an example.

Create a folder for each class and within each of these create more folders: Assignments, Lectures, Handouts, Powerpoints, E-Portfolio (or Final Assignments), Graded Assignments, Discussion Board Posts, etc. Within these folders organize by assignment, if necessary: (Assignment 1: Instructions, Blank Assignment Page,Rough Drafts, Files Turned In, Instructor Feedback, etc.)

In the E-Portfolio folder for each class, keep a copy of the Green Sheet, Course Calendar, Roster (with email addresses), your grades, and a Word Doc called E-Portfolio. On this document, log: class name, professor name and contact info, semester you were in the class, team member names and contact info, lists of the exact file used to turn in final product for each assignment (very helpful, especially when you go through several drafts and revisions), a short description of each assignment, and all of the competencies potentially supported by this class and what piece of evidence might be used to show that it supports this competency. This might sound like a lot of work, but it's really not if you start with everything organized in this way. At the end of each semester, just take some time to put some info into this "E-Portfolio" page for each class.

Finally, keep all emails organized by class. Some of them may come in handy for proof of team work, leadership skills, etc.

A few other back-up strategies to avoid disaster:

1.) E-mail your final versions of your course assignments to yourself and just keep them in an e-Portfolio folder in your e-mail account.
This method assumes you have a secure e-mail account (e.g. web-based like Yahoo! or GMail) with plenty of memory. I have actually rescued a few assignments just from looking over old emails.

2)Saving copies of all your SLIS files in an USB flash drive is another back-up strategy to save all of your work. Make sure you do this in a regular basis. Drawing entire folders into the flash drive is an easy and fast way to save all of your work. Make sure to place the flash drive in a safe location. I also had copies of my SLIS files on my desktop computer, and laptop. Back up in three places.

Sad story - I lost an entire semester because I only had things backed up twice. My laptop hard drive crashed and destroyed everything. Not to worry, as I had a flash drive and backup copies on my desktop, right? Wrong! The desktop files did not have that last semester on it. I lost the flash drive before I could copy that one semester onto it. So, I lost all the files from two classes. One of the classes was my LIBR240 course, which was all web files that did not get saved after that semester. While I still attain the knowledge in my brain, and was actually able to reconstruct some evidence, it was not optimal. Dozens (or even hundreds?) of hours of work down the drain.

Angelique's tips for writing ePortfolio:

1) During the semester you begin, start right away and don't wait until too late to get started. You only have 12 weeks to write the entire thing, and that includes revising and editing.

2) Don't worry about the evidence. It is more important that your writing prove your competency. You can always create new evidence if you can't come up with any. It's not the best situation, but it has been done.

3) Save everything, including Elluminate recordings! Even discussion posts can be used as evidence.

4) Remember to breathe. You will prevail.