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OK, I'm paranoid! (Was: TWs and their work tools!)
Subject:OK, I'm paranoid! (Was: TWs and their work tools!) From:Brent -dot- Jones -at- Level3 -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 29 Jan 2001 14:08:42 -0700
jkajpust -at- concentric -dot- net wrote on Saturday, January 27, 2001 10:21 PM:
> As far as backups go, I have e-mailed copies of my work to my
> home e-mail account just to make sure I have something floating
> around in case my work machine crashes.
Depending on your situation, and how sensitive the stuff you document is,
this might get you in trouble. As a contractor, I never email any documents
outside of the company unless it's explicitly permitted under the contract
(generally as part of a telecommuting clause--if you're telecommuting as a
contractor make sure the agreement covers having proprietary company docs on
your personal equipment, etc.) or OK'd by the manager.
This might sound paranoid, but you'd be amazed how quickly 'having a backup
copy of the doc at home' can turn into 'stealing $60,000,000 of proprietary
information from the plaintiff.' Something almost exactly like that (even
down to the amount of claimed damages) happened to a technical writer here
in Colorado back in '93, when his relationship w/ his employer (Hauser
Chemical Research) soured. I believe in that case it was more complex than
the writer just having copied docs onto his home machine, but the point is
that if he hadn't, or had but obtained the explicit right to, then the whole
theft thing would have been a non-issue. As it was, they came after the guy.
Along the same lines, I'd check with your IT dept. or manager before using
any of the free, Web-based storage partitions (xdrive, etc.) to store or
transfer work-related docs. Those partitions sometimes aren't as secure as
they might be, and your employer might not want company docs out from behind
the firewall for any reason.
If your company doesn't have any good remote backup facilities or
procedures, you can often at least cache a copy on the corporate mail server
by emailing a copy to yourself at work. I'd avoid the home thing, though.
FWIW,
cheers,
brent
--
Brent Jones
brent -dot- jones -at- level3 -dot- com
"In the Kingdom of Boredom, I wear the royal sweatpants."
--Mark Leyner, _My Cousin My Gastroenterologist_
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