What is the risk of keeping project files on personal drives?
They become the project’s dark matter: real, load-bearing and invisible. The calculation that justified a design decision sits in the OneDrive of somebody who left in March. The presentation everyone calls “the final one” exists in four versions across five inboxes. And when a dispute asks for any of it, you cannot produce what you cannot see.
The files are doing work nobody can see
Files on personal drives are not idle. They are the basis of decisions — the calculation behind a design change, the photographs of the reinforcement before the pour, the version of the programme everybody actually worked from.
The project depends on them and cannot see them. That is not a filing problem; it is a governance one, and it only announces itself at the worst possible moment.
Three ways it costs you
And none of them shows up until the file is needed:
- Departure. Storage assigned to a person leaves with the person. An organisation that lost a consultant in March lost their working files in March, and will find out in year two.
- Version sprawl. A file emailed is a file forked. Four copies called “final” are not the same file, and nobody can say which one was used — least of all after the fact.
- Discovery. In a dispute you are asked to produce what is relevant, and “it was on someone’s laptop” is not an answer that helps you. The same argument the correspondence record rests on applies to files without modification.
And it is friction, not defiance
People do not put files on personal drives to hide them. They do it because it is faster. If putting a file where the project can see it takes longer than attaching it to an email, it gets attached to an email — and the fork nobody kept is the one that mattered.
Which means the fix is not a policy. It is making the governed path faster than the workaround, and then the behaviour fixes itself.
References
- module: /modules/zepth-drive/ — the project workspace; the knowledge-loss argument is anchored on /modules/project-email/
Zepth is the construction project delivery platform — it runs construction, procurement and asset management on one record, and does the work: reading the drawings, reviewing the submittals, matching the invoices and flagging the risks, with a human sign-off on anything consequential.
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