Personal files on work computer?
 

Hello,

What is the best practice for this? A free standing hard drive for my personal stuff?

I get taxes and similar data and need a place to store things. I understand keeping this off the work PC.

I am suspect on security / long term viability of Google drive or Dropbox. Should I be?

Love to hear the braintrust on this. I do have a separate personal computer but I spend 99% of my time on my work rig. So things just pass through even on my personal email.

TIA!

Depending on your companies usage policy having an external hd could be a bit problematic.

I would just email docs to your personal address or keep them in the cloud. I wouldn't worry about google going anywhere.

It all depends on company policy and the IT department.

Something like OneDrive is easy and fairly secure. Many large companies disable any USB port so thumb drives or external drives are not an option. It would bee too easy to copy sensitive company data or introduce a virus or worm into their system.

I am employed in state government. There shall be NO mixing of work and personal devices or technologies. Never the twain shall meet. Unfortunately, with two cell phones and two computers, it seems there are a great many communication methods I need to manage. Phone calls, text messages, voice mail, email, etc.

I have worked at a small startup for a while now and it's certainly refreshing to not have an overbearing set of IT rules to follow. Or any rules really, Just plain old common sense rules the day.

Back when my wife still worked, she worked for a local state owned university. She had a cell phone and only gave the number to friends. She made it clear if they email or text or call her about work stuff she will hang up, or delete the text or email and never reply. She did not ever want the possibility of her phone getting subpoenaed. They would not pay for a cell phone.

Couldn't agree more.

You have personal emails and information sent to your work computer?

In this day and age that is preposterous. Sorry.

We let our employees access and use any web-based personal email accounts since that is how personal commerce is done.

Horrible idea.

You no longer own or have a right to privacy on anything that touches a work computer.

My employer has 'rules', but the reality they don't care about 'reasonable' amounts of personal work. In the past I have saved things on my work hard drive out of convenience, but for security and peace of mind I would suggest a small external drive or a USB, they sync at home.

I would set up a DropBox account and save your personal stuff there. Access your personal email via cloud e.g. Gmail. Have personal email sent only to personal account, not to work account.

Same here about 'reasonable' amounts of personal work. I have a personal drive on the network where I keep confidential company stuff and some personal stuff. The reasoning is that I can access it anywhere. I do this with the understanding that anyone with the proper authority can gain access to my personal stuff as I have with terminated employees.

BTW, I hardly use a hard drive for anything. Why? Because my company is very good at back ups. Unfortunately I've had to test it a few times and they've always recovered. Also, when my computer dies, I just order another one, load a couple of programs, and I'm go to go. No loss of data.

Excellent input. Thank you all. It is great to get opinions from outside my bubble.

Smallish local business of which I am one of the owners. So there is some "wiggle room."

I appreciate the strict segregation comments. It is a great dose of reality. Thank you!

Common sense says keep your personal files separate from work. I kept my personal work on a laptop computer separate from the office network and I owned the company.

I am one of the owners of my company. I do not have a company computer.

I use my own. It is so much cleaner and easier.

I’m confused. How do you reconcile that with your first sentence in post #7?

This

His theory is that he's having business stuff show up on his personal computer, not personal stuff show up on his business computer (because he doesn't have a business computer). Of course, if you're doing business on a computer, then that's your business computer, so his personal computer is his business computer.

Frankly, it's a bad idea. You never know what will happen and technically you may get the 'not appropriate use of company resources' speech one day. It's the company's machine.

If I try plugging any USB storage device into my work laptop- my work laptop will ENCRYPT that storage device. Then again, I work for a big bank.

rjp

+1. Avoid company hardware for anything personal. That said the only thing I have on my corporate laptop are a couple fun pictures of myself. I directly email tax/payroll stuff from it to my personal account and keep available for the corporate to review. Do not delete anything.

What are you talking about? Nothing business proprietary is stored on my personal computer. We have processes in place that allow email, web work, online meeting, etc. to take place on any computer. If it becomes business proprietary, we have ways of dealing with that so I don’t host the files.

Since I own the computer I can do personal business on the computer without shifting back and forth between a company asset and my own computer. If I chose to use a company asset to access our online tools, I would not use it for personal business

It is that simple. Don’t over think it.

Why oh why would you have personal stuff on a company owned computer? Add to that a work phone.

My lesson learned years ago - you get let go for whatever reason - you get walked out the door. Grab your coat, go to HR: do not pass go, do not collect $200. - you are not going back to pack things up. My personal stuff is send to me as I'm no longer welcomed. I have seen 40+ yr veterans get walked out. It is chilling.

There are no personal files/contacts/internet history on any company device. Nope - It's just a bad idea. I have seen people get fired for Facebook/porn/personal email, etc.

Personal files on work computer?
 

I haven't read all the posts but based on the title: Bad idea on several levels.
-Anything on the company computer become company property. You have zero rights to privacy.
-If the company machine has a key stroke logger, all your data and passwords are now theirs.
-You can be accused of doing personal things on the company time.
-If the computer gets a virus, you will be a prime suspect for having brought it in.
-Since you have control over the level of security, if the company gets hacked, you are hacked.


Keep everything separate. At the place where I work, attaching a jump drive to the company computer is a firing offense (to protect the company data and customer's data he store). Get a cheap laptop of your own and bring it in with you.

I have a couple of items (nothing earth shattering) on my work laptop, but will be copying them to a thumb drive in a few days and deleting them. Nothing there with personal identifiable information.

Never did it.

[QUOTE=A930Rocket;11230795]I have a couple of items (nothing earth shattering) on my work laptop, but will be copying them to a thumb drive in a few days and deleting them. Nothing there with personal identifiable information.[/QUOTE
what if the company gets hacked and someone says they saw you downloading files onto a thumb drive and put it in your pocket?

Another option is to encrypt any personal stuff that you keep on your work laptop.

It used to be hard to not have ANY personal stuff on your work laptop, because carrying two laptops is a pain and when you’re in a hotel and want to do some personal stuff, you’re not going to wait until you get home.

So I may or may not have once completely wiped my work laptop, before handing it in with my badge. As in, opened the machine up, pulled the drive, plugged it into my desktop, used secure delete software to overwrite every bit on the drive, put the drive back in the machine and handed in a dead machine. IT re-images the machine anyway before issuing it to the next drone, and any actual work data was always on a network drive so all that was being wiped was Windows OS, Office and some standard apps.

Now, with cloud storage easily available, there’s no reason to keep anything personal on a work machine. Unless IT blocks access to cloud services etc, as some do.

Nope.

I have personal PC's.

I have separate PC's for my current company.

I have separate PC's for the companies I consult for.

Just got 1st round funding for a new start up, bought another PC.

Prevents me from sending email to A from B's account, mixing up their files, messaging the wrong channels on Teams or Slack.

It's also the only way to handle overlapping video calls. Not uncommon for me to be on 2-3 video calls simultaneously.

And yes, it sucks as bad as it sounds.

Personal files on work computer?

As long as it's not porn of political I don't see a problem with it.

But as a support tech I have had to deal with someone who had filled his hard drive up with personal photos and videos.
Imagine having to fix a laptop that has 420GB of personal photos/videos and it wont boot normally!

And of course the idiot didn't back them up so I had to copy the photos before rebuilding the laptop to fix the problem.

That may sound easy but I had to boot it into "safe mode with networking" and then copy them over the local network.
It took more than 20 hours to do that! (The idiot was a VIP and his hard drive was encrypted so there was no other option)

Got it, so you're likely doing some sort of VPN or remote access. That wasn't clear from your initial post.

I used to work for a smallish company that had technicians that traveled to oil rigs, drill ships, etc... in the Gulf of Mexico, Africa, etc... I was talking to one of the IT guys that did desktop support once. He told me that a lot of those techs and some other guys in the business offices that should know better, had porn, including home made (wives, girlfriends, whatever) on their laptops. He'd apparently seen some stuff that you just can't unsee.