
Ask HN: Do you backup your data when leaving a company? - unscrupulous_sw
Or do you leave a blackhole for all those years of your life that you can&#x27;t refer back to?<p>This is for personal records, not pulling a Levandowski. Just nice to know what inane email you wasted time writing and what stupid meeting you were stuck in on any particular day when you look back at your life a few years later.<p>I am sure it would be against all company policy to do this even though you&#x27;re the author of the content you&#x27;re saving. So on a technical level, how do you not get flagged by IT doing this? I am assuming they aren&#x27;t adding event&#x2F;key loggers to all the laptops they give to employees?
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davismwfl
It depends on a few things, primarily what the data is you are backing up, who
the company is and what your role is.

If you are backing up source code from their systems onto your own drives, you
are pretty much in violation of both moral and legal obligations. Emails could
be argued could go either way, if the email contained trade secrets or other
IP or protected data then you could still be in violation. If you forwarded an
email on personal appointments that you had on your work calendar than
generally that is safe.

As for the black hole of life, I have a couple of fairly significant times
periods you could consider black holes. One especially is sad because I feel
it is where I did some of the most awesome work of my career but I just don't
have anything to share or show for it since it was all the companies work. I
didn't keep one iota of anything from them because it wasn't mine.

I know of some companies that do install file transfer watchers. So the moving
of any file on or off the computer is logged and monitored, but keystrokes are
not. So doesn't take a keystroke logger. When I ran IT and development for a
medical company we installed network based file detection so we could also see
if people were moving more data or data that matched certain patterns around
on the network. This let us take those logs and tie them to computers and
people and see if it was authorized. We also had software on all the computers
that monitored files on/off and blocked USB and CD/DVD drives. Eventually we
uninstalled all CD/DVD and started ordering machines without USB (that was a
chore and so not worth it IMO).

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gitgud
Why reminisce on old work emails? I can't think of anything less
interesting...

But if you wanted to ex-filtrate that data (like some sort of spy) your best
bet could be to connect to your email remotely via IMAP and replicate all the
messages off site. This is probably much less traceable than physically
copying data on your work computer...

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Someone1234
That sounds exactly like "pulling a Levandowski."

But also, no, because I have a simple rule: Don't store personal data on
company property (including logins/session cookies). When I leave every night,
if I never got access to that PC again it shouldn't matter.

I do occasionally log into public websites using personal credentials. But the
way the browser is configured, they're ephemeral (meaning if the browser is
closed/PC powers off, they no longer exist; this is all trivial with via
Firefox's config pro-tip: Set browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash to
false).

As to taking stuff with me: Memories. I highly doubt I'd ever want to read
inter-company email years later even if I could, I cannot see the nostalgia
value there. Plus it is illegal.

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eivarv
I'm sure you could make a case for a few non-sensitive emails – but I think
what you're talking about might be a civil or even a criminal offence
(depending on where you live and the relevant jurisdiction), as the work and
communications records are likely defined as your employer's property in some
sort of binding document(contract/handbook/law).

There are of course exceptions to this, for instance in the case of whistle-
blowing.

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Trias11
I made an "essential notes" along the work in restrictive place that proved to
be super useful 2-3 years after.

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codingdave
No, if I leave a job, then I have left. There is no reason I would need
details of business communications or meetings from a former job in my
personal life.

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bifrost
I think most people do keep backups, especially of email. Email clients are
designed to download mail and its easy to keep it offline.

I'm pretty careful and delete previous work product unless its open sourced.

On a technical level, unless your company has DLP software, there's no way to
know.

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free652
No, I don't need to. And I have heard about keyloggers, forced usb encryption
and even burnt out USB ports.

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amai
Try Evernote.

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Tomte
> Just nice to know what inane email you wasted time writing and what stupid
> meeting you were stuck in on any particular day when you look back at your
> life a few years later.

That sounds so bizarre that I'm pretty certain you're not really asking about
"personal records".

And no, I don't steal my employer's data. You shouldn't, either.

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unscrupulous_sw
This is an anonymous account. The unscrupulous part of my user name is in
reference to another thread where I used stealing and sharing interview
questions as an example so I am not really trying to hide anything:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20812755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20812755)

But when I wrote that comment I actually did think that backing up emails
would be universally agreed to be morally fine. It's just so tame in
comparison to acts of the pirates who get idolized for building silicon
valley.

The motivation for this question is genuine. I hate having a gap in my google
calendar or not being able to recall the details of some project I was working
on. But I did choose to move on so yea they are stupid fucking projects even
though I might need to reference them later on when updating resumes and such.

