Getting your files off one person's laptop and somewhere the business owns

Nobody designs it this way. It happens because one person started doing the job, saved the file to their desktop, and got on with it. Ten years later that folder is the business, and it exists in one place, on one disk, in one bag, insured for the value of the laptop rather than the value of the work.

We are not going to put a figure on what that would cost you, because it depends entirely on what is in the folder. What we will say is that the question to ask is not whether the laptop will fail. It is what happens on the morning it does, or the morning its owner hands in their notice.

The hardware failing is the one people picture, and in our experience it is the least common of the three.

The instinct is to drag the folder into OneDrive or Google Drive and consider it done. That gets the files off the laptop, which is genuinely the biggest win, and it usually creates a second problem: everything is now in one person's personal cloud storage, which is attached to their account. If they leave, the folder leaves with them, and you are back where you started with an extra step.

What you want is storage that belongs to the organisation rather than to a person. In Microsoft 365 that means SharePoint or a Teams site rather than an individual's OneDrive. In Google Workspace it means a shared drive rather than My Drive. The distinction sounds like pedantry until somebody leaves, at which point it is the whole ballgame.

Do the move as a proper piece of work rather than a drag and drop on a Friday. That means deciding the folder structure before you copy, agreeing what is live and what is archive, and checking the count and size of what arrived against what left. Long file paths and unusual characters in file names are the usual cause of files silently not making it, and a copy that reports success is not the same as a copy that is complete.

Once the files are shared, the next question is who can see what, and the honest default in most small businesses is everyone can see everything. That is fine right up until it is not. Payroll, HR records, staff disciplinary notes, contracts and pricing are the usual things people are surprised to find open to the whole company.

Set permissions on folders rather than on individual files, and set them on groups rather than on named people. A group called Accounts that has three people in it is easy to reason about a year later. Twelve individual permissions scattered across nine folders is not, and it is how businesses end up with someone who left last spring still able to open the quotes folder.

Be careful with sharing links as well. A link set to anyone with the link works for anyone who ends up with the link, including whoever the original recipient forwards it to. For anything sensitive, share to named people instead, and set an expiry on links that go outside the business.

When someone leaves, the instinct is to delete the account and save the licence. Do not do that on day one. Disable it instead, so nobody can sign in, then work through what was attached to it: files in their personal storage, mail, calendar bookings, anything shared out from their account, and anything they were the sole owner of.

Files stored in the organisation's shared area are unaffected by a leaver, which is exactly the point of putting them there. Files in a personal area are not. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace both give you a window to retrieve or transfer that content after an account is disabled, and once that window closes it is genuinely gone.

Write down a short leaver checklist while nobody is leaving. Disable the account, reset the password, remove them from groups, transfer ownership of any shared files and calendars, collect the hardware, and only then, some weeks later, remove the licence.

Modern shared storage keeps previous versions of a file, which is a real and useful thing. Someone overwrites a spreadsheet with rubbish, you open the version history, you restore yesterday's copy, and the crisis lasts four minutes. It is one of the strongest arguments for getting off the laptop.

It is not a backup, and this is the point where people relax too early. A shared drive syncs. That is its job. If a file is deleted, the deletion syncs. If a folder is renamed into nonsense by an accident, that syncs too. If ransomware encrypts a synced folder on one machine, the encrypted versions replicate to the cloud copy and to everyone else's machine, faithfully and quickly.

Version history and the recycle bin both run on a clock set by the platform, and both can be exhausted or turned off. A separate backup, held somewhere the day to day accounts cannot reach and restorable to a point in time, is a different thing doing a different job. The test is simple: could you get back a folder as it stood four months ago, after somebody deleted it three months ago and nobody noticed until now.

And a backup you have never restored from is a hope rather than a safety net. Try restoring something real, once, and see how long it takes.

You do not need anything elaborate. For most small businesses the finished picture is short.

The reason this gets put off is that it feels disruptive, and done carelessly it is. People lose track of where files are, two versions of the same folder start living in parallel, and everyone quietly drifts back to the laptop. The way to avoid that is to move in one deliberate pass, agree the structure in advance, and make the old location read only on the day rather than leaving it available as a comfortable escape route.

If years of files have accumulated into something nobody wants to look at, that is normal and it is the usual reason this sits on the list for another year. Send us a rough idea of how much there is and where it currently sits, and we will tell you honestly whether it is a morning's work or a proper project.