Blog post on owning identity and backups (#1677)

## Description

Blog post on owning identity and backups

Co-authored-by: Nocnica Mellifera <noctnica@gmail.com>

website/blog/2022-12-2-your-own-backups.md

@@ -0,0 +1,72 @@
+---
+slug: your-own-backups
+title: "Owning Your Identity and Data For The Price of One ☕️/Month "
+authors: nica
+tags: [corso, microsoft 365]
+---
+
+
+I recently saw a tweet that really spoke to me:
+
+![Gian Paolo tweet stating The only long-term solution to maintain your identity is: 1. your own domain name 2. your own website/blog 3. several backups](../static/img/blog/gian_tweet_backups.png)
+
+Gian was really addressing the chaotic situation with Twitter, but it feels much more broadly applicable in today’s climate.
+Given the increased role of automation in flagging “bad” accounts,
+ there is now an ever-growing list of examples where imperfect AI-based systems misclassify perfectly legitimate accounts
+ as bad. With no human-based recourse with most large companies, this has led to disastrous situations where
+ email account suspensions lead to lost accessing to other services that you have used your entire life
+ (due to SSO via your email account), AdWords account suspensions lead to a small business unable to advertise, or a
+ flagged application account leads to published applications being automatically withdrawn from app stores.
+
+Thankfully, the growth of easy-to-use SaaS services now allow you to, for the price of a coffee a month,
+control and maintain not just your identity without risk but also all your personal and,
+for all you entrepreneurs, business data too. There’s a happy state, for individuals and teams, where you feel fully in
+control of your own identity. This makes you more resilient to systemic failures and changes in one platform’s policy.
+How do we achieve this ownership nirvana? The pieces are simple:
+
+* Buy your own domain: Right now, `.me` is available for $3/year and `.online` is available for $0.99/year.
+
+* Pick someone to host your email with the above domain: We highly recommend [Microsoft 365 Business for $6 /month](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business).
+
+* Microsoft Office applications that you know and love, 1TB of file storage, unlimited video meetings,
+and more: FREE with your Microsoft 365 subscription.
+
+* Your own blog at your own domain: Static hosting with a global CDN like AWS CloudFront will be < $1/month!
+
+OK, so the above might cost the equivalent of two coffees a month (or way less than an
+[expensive San Francisco coffee](https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/world-most-expensive-coffee-elida-geisha-natural-klatch-san-francisco/190823/))
+but you are suddenly in control of your identity, and this is not even tied to Microsoft 365 (more on that below!) even
+though you are using it at this time. This is an amazing cost to value ratio given how important our data is.
+
+## Securing your own data means controlling your own backups
+
+Now, you might believe that your identity is tied to Microsoft’s control of your account but that is not true.
+Given that you own your domain, you can now take your data and email with you to any other provider.
+Having moved between Google Suite and Microsoft 365 in the past, this can be made seamless.
+
+That said, if we go back to Gian’s tweet at the beginning of this article,
+there is one big issue that we failed to consider: backups! You want to back up your data in an independent location
+(cloud storage, your server under your desk, etc.) for many really important reasons: to protect against ransomware,
+to give you independent access to your data (email, files, messages) if the cloud provider locks you out overnight,
+to be able to port your data over if a cloud provider’s
+policies change seemingly overnight, or even to just respect
+[Microsoft’s shared responsibility model](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamentals/shared-responsibility)
+where you are responsible for your data’s safety and Microsoft only promises to take care of the infrastructure.
+
+So, ensure you and your data is always protected, set up regular backups!
+
+## How can Corso help?
+
+Backups can be complicated and, till recently, great backup solutions for Microsoft 365 might have been “enterprise”
+offerings that would cost many, many, MANY coffees a month. However, all of that is now behind us!
+
+We recently introduced Corso, a free, secure, and 100% open-source tool to let you create a backup of all your data in
+your Microsoft subscription. Backups go to a cloud storage provider of your choice, giving you fine-grained control of
+your data and independence from your primary cloud provider. Data is also compressed and deduplicated to reduce cost
+(pennies a month with systems such as AWS Glacier Instant Access) and encrypted with user-provided keys so that no one
+can see your data and that it is safe against hackers and ransomware.
+
+![corso Screenshot](../static/img/blog/corso_backup.png)
+
+Corso is available now, and we’d love to hear your thoughts! Download it, give it a try, and join us on Discord to let
+us know what you think.