Personnel Dossier: Khamitova, J.

Name: Yemilia "Jema" Alexandrovna Khamitova-Romanovskaya
DoB: 6th June 2156, New Novosibersk
Augments: Hwangso HXC-1000 visuals, Stage II retroviral cosmetic rejuvenation

Education: Graduate of the Alliance Naval Academy class of 2176, received the Sword of Honour for graduating at the top of her class.

Instructor's Comment: JK was not the smartest or the strongest but she was, by some distance, the most determined. She never, ever relents in anything she does.

Military Service:  Commissioned as an Ensign in the Special Activities Division of the Naval Infantry. Military occupational specialties: Close Quarters Combat (Armed), Close Quarters Combat (Unarmed), Firearms, Explosives, Trauma Medicine. Awarded Combat Service Ribbon for the counter-insurgency action at [REDACTED] and the Naval Cross for her actions during the boarding of the [REDACTED].

Commanding Officer's Comment: One of the bravest and most action focussed junior officers that I have ever served with in the Sads. She was the first person through the hull breach on the [REDACTED] when we boarded it and the last person to leave it as it was breaking up.

General Intelligence Directorate Activties: Transferred to the GID in 2179 on the specific request of the Executive Director's Chief of Staff. Now performs assignments of the highest sensitivity and importance under the direct control of the EDCoS. No ratings within the normal GID evaluatory framework are possible as all activities are executed outside the control of the Operations Section.

Losing My Shit

T. E. Lawrence once famously left the manuscript for Seven Pillars of Wisdom at Reading railway station and, despite an offer of reward and beseeching newspaper advertisments, had to rewrite it from memory.

So how do I protect myself from this manner of catastrophic loss. In the digital age it is both easier and more complex but to mitigate the risks we first have to understand what they are.

The most obvious and likely scenario that could cause a writer to lose material would be a hardware failure on their computer. The best way to protect against this is an online storage service such as Dropbox, iCloud or OneDrive. These services will automatically make an online copy of the work and if, stricken by a hardware failure, one could simply resynchronise a new device. Happily, this would also preserve your work for posterity should your house burn down with you in it.

What such a service would not protect against is some manner of encryption threat such as a ransomware attack as the local encryption would rapidly be replicated in the online copy. Anti virus will provide some but not total prophylaxis against such an attack. In order to preserve documents from a ransomware attacked there has to be a copy which air gapped, i.e. not physically connected, to the infected network.

One way to do this is by having another computer or device which is only sporadically powered on to connect and synchronise its copy of the documents. Obviously, having a seperate computer for this purpose isn't ideal for everyone so an external hard drive is only seldomly connected would also work but you'd have to manage the file copying operation for yourself.

There is also the remote chance that the documents themselves could become corrupt and unreadable across all your backups. This happens much less frequently than it did in the ancient pre-history of personal computing but I wouldn't say it's impossible that it can still happen; particularly with very large and heavily revised files like, say, a novel manuscript...

This is my practice:

• Every chapter gets its own file and sits in its own directory. This protects against file and directory corruption for a work in progress. The very most I could lose is one chapter.
• My entire body of work is synchronised online with Dropbox. This protects against hardware failure and house fires.
• Once a month I start up a virtual machine on my PC which connects to Dropbox and synchronises all the files. This protects against ransomware and other malware as the VM is usually powered off and therefore the files inside it are invisible. If malware that encrypts virtual hard disk files appear then I may switch this function to seperate physical hardware such as an Android tablet.