Before you quit, clean out personal data from office computer

With today’s ever-changing job scene, chances are you will end up moving from one employer to another at some point.

Before leaving, you have to turn in your work computer and other work-related equipment. One mistake many people make is to return the computer loaded with their personal information – some of which could haunt them in future.

Pretty much everything you do on a PC, including Internet activity, is stored permanently on the computer’s hard drive. Sending items to the recycle bin, might make them inaccessible to a novice like you but not to a super snoop with the knowhow or the software to retrieve the information.

If you have any personal files with sensitive information on them, you may want to take the extra step of overwriting their actual contents, too. Overwriting an Ms Word document will mean, opening the document, selecting all text and deleting it before hitting the save button.

In the now clear document, type garbage stuff in the file, save and then trash it before empting the trash/recycle bin.

Overwriting in this fashion won’t completely eliminate the organisation’s ability to retrieve what used to be there, but it will at least make it very difficult for anyone who isn’t in IT to see what was in your files.

Don’t leave behind all that valuable contact information you accumulated over the years. Aside from personal files, grab anything you worked on that might be considered a strong example of your work to show potential employers or clients in the future. In some careers, like media, your work samples are publicly available, so nabbing them from your computer isn’t a real concern.

In other fields, though, your work isn’t publicly visible. If you have any samples of your work, it wouldn’t be a strict violation for you to show them privately to outside parties. For those, you can carry along some copies.

Nothing replaces backing up your files. Some obvious ways to backup these files would be through external hard drives, CDs, or USB thumb drives.

RUN BACKUPS

While external hard drives can be expensive, they’re also extremely convenient. You don’t need to install any software. You can take it home with you every day. You can run backups any time. The downside is your latest backup could be slightly out of date, depending on the circumstances and timing of your leaving.

If those are not available to you, no problem. While you could certainly e-mail these documents to your personal e-mail account, you can use an online storage solution like Google Drive; which can easily be accessed from almost any device.

Here’s a much better idea: Instead of keeping personal files on the company-owned computer, consider switching to a cloud-based syncing programme that offers online document creation, such as Google Drive or Microsoft’s SkyDrive, instead.

With either of those services, you can create word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, right within a Web browser and store them online, all for free. That means they never have to be on your office computer in the first place, and you never have to worry about saving them or deleting them if you’re asked to leave your position on short notice.

If you want to use Dropbox or SugarSync, a safer way to store stuff from your office computer is to use the Web app instead of the locally installed programme, although it requires more manual work.

Instead of keeping files in a folder that syncs, you can upload your files to the service via the website. In a panic, this method will take too long, but if you have a week or two to clean up your workspace before your last day, it’s a good solution.

Sam Wambugu is a monitoring and evaluation specialist. Email: [email protected]