Or do you leave a blackhole for all those years of your life that you can'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're the author of the content you're saving. So on a technical level, how do you not get flagged by IT doing this? I am assuming they aren't adding event/key loggers to all the laptops they give to employees?
It depends on a few things, primarily what the data is you are backing up, who the company is and what your role is.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).
Why reminisce on old work emails? I can't think of anything less interesting...<p>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...
That sounds exactly like "pulling a Levandowski."<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
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).<p>There are of course exceptions to this, for instance in the case of whistle-blowing.
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.
I think most people do keep backups, especially of email. Email clients are designed to download mail and its easy to keep it offline.<p>I'm pretty careful and delete previous work product unless its open sourced.<p>On a technical level, unless your company has DLP software, there's no way to know.
> 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>That sounds so bizarre that I'm pretty certain you're not really asking about "personal records".<p>And no, I don't steal my employer's data. You shouldn't, either.