[NERD_ALERT]

What company is allowing employees to have so much data locally? Almost all work is stored in a cloud now. Documents, spreadsheets, design docs, code… If you really are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the corporation using severely outdated practices.

[lazyasciiart]

> located on their user account or hardware

Clouds have user accounts too. I have seen dead links to documents in a former employees space on sharepoint, confluence, and google docs.

[cogman10]

Exactly. In fact, I still regularly get sharepoint "request for access" notifications in my email for some presentation I did a year ago. Even though I swear I've opened it up to the entire org.

Who knows what happens when I've shuffled away from my current company.

Dead links are also incredibly common, particularly because we are on our nth port from sharepoint to confluence to whatever back to sharepoint. Generally, because C levels don't want to pay for this year's price hike.

[lrem]

Why locally? In practice many companies never lose any data. What they lose is the knowledge what the data is and/or how to use it.

[LoganDark]

> If you really are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the corporation using severely outdated practices.

They probably just used now-outdated practices before those practices were outdated. This happened in the past, remember. Sure, the cloud is a thing today, but was the cloud such a thing 5, 10, 20 years ago? Do you really think it's their fault for not knowing in advance how much of a thing the cloud would one day become? Oh, how outdated. Sheesh.

[soco]

I would think policies should also be updated every X years in light of new regulations, new possibilities, new limitations... but who enjoys policies and even updating them? So here we are, everything done "by the book" and losing data because of that.

[thaumasiotes]

> Sure, the cloud is a thing today, but was the cloud such a thing 5, 10, 20 years ago?

Yes, yes, and no.

For example, https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/908:_The_Cloud is from 2011.

[LoganDark]

The Onion also made some pretty good cloud parodies back in 2012: https://youtu.be/9ntPxdWAWq8

Old animation though I wouldn't necessarily expect to only have been 10 years ago, and 10 years ago I wouldn't expect to be scolded for not using the cloud.

[sarlalian]

Well, the typical setup with OneDrive in MS365, is that the overworked manager get’s an email when an employee account is deactivated. The manager has 90 days to search through their OneDrive and copy anything out that they think is needed, possibly to the central SharePoint or to their own OneDrive. I’m sure there are similar policies and procedures in place for enterprise dropbox, box.net, and Google Drive. So typically employee leaves and the manager never gets around to copying data out, 6-9 months later they need something that employee had, and yell at IT to recover it. IT laughs and laughs and then cries.

[windward]

Any company where you're not allowed to force-push to a public branch.

[mattl]

Local git repo checkouts?