Over the past six years, the members of the MetaArchive Cooperative have worked to identify a series of best practices for distributed digital preservation readiness. These best practices can benefit ongoing initiatives as well as start-up programs which have not yet established regular procedures and standards for directory structures, metadata, and file naming conventions. We document what we term the “calf-path syndrome,” the way in which early strides in an organization's digitization work may create a legacy that is detrimental to the preservation readiness of their growing digital collections. We share relatively simple principles and guidelines for such programs that can greatly improve the subsequent likelihood of implementing successful distributed digital preservation programs.