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## Description The previous image was not clipping correctly and possibly leading to fewer clickthroughs. ## Does this PR need a docs update or release note? - [x] ⛔ No ## Type of change - [x] 🗺️ Documentation
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5.3 KiB
Markdown
88 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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slug: your-own-backups
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title: "Owning Your Identity and Data For The Price of One ☕️/Month "
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description: "How to, for the price of a cup of coffee/month, control your identity by owning your domain, email, and portable data backups"
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authors: nica
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tags: [corso, microsoft 365]
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date: 2022-12-05
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image: ./images/you_are_your_own_brand.jpeg
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---
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<!-- vale Vale.Spelling = NO -->
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I recently saw a tweet, shown below, that really spoke to me.
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Gian was really addressing the chaotic situation with Twitter, but it feels much more broadly applicable in today’s climate.
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Given the increased role of automation in flagging “bad” accounts,
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there is now an ever-growing list of examples where imperfect AI-based systems misclassify perfectly legitimate accounts
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as bad. With no human-based recourse with most large companies, this has led to disastrous situations where
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email account suspensions lead to lost accessing to other services that you have used your entire life
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(due to SSO via your email account), AdWords account suspensions lead to a small business unable to advertise, or a
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flagged application account leads to published applications being automatically withdrawn from app stores.
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<!-- truncate -->
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<!-- vale Vale.Spelling = YES -->
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<!-- vale alex.Condescending = NO -->
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A way out exists though! The growth of easy-to-use SaaS services now allow you to, for the price of a coffee a month,
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control and maintain not just your identity without risk but also all your personal and,
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for all you entrepreneurs, business data too. There’s a happy state, for individuals and teams, where you feel fully in
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control of your own identity. This makes you more resilient to systemic failures and changes in one platform’s policy.
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How do we achieve this ownership nirvana? The pieces are straightforward:
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<!-- vale alex.Condescending = YES -->
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* Buy your own domain: Right now, `.me` is available for $3/year and `.online` is available for $0.99/year.
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* 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).
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* Microsoft Office applications that you know and love, 1TB of file storage, unlimited video meetings,
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and more: FREE with your Microsoft 365 subscription.
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* Your own blog at your own domain: Static hosting with a global CDN like AWS CloudFront will be < $1/month!
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OK, so the above might cost the equivalent of two coffees a month (or way less than an
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[expensive San Francisco coffee](https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/world-most-expensive-coffee-elida-geisha-natural-klatch-san-francisco/190823/))
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but you are suddenly in control of your identity, and this isn't even tied to Microsoft 365 (more on that below!) even
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though you are using it at this time. This is an amazing cost to value ratio given how important our data is.
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## Securing your own data means controlling your own backups
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Now, you might believe that your identity is tied to Microsoft’s control of your account but that's not true.
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Given that you own your domain, you can now take your data and email with you to any other provider.
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Having moved between Google Suite and Microsoft 365 in the past, this can be made seamless.
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That said, if we go back to Gian’s tweet at the beginning of this article,
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there is one big issue that we failed to consider: backups! You want to back up your data in an independent location
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(cloud storage, your server under your desk, etc.) for many really important reasons: to protect against ransomware,
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to give you independent access to your data (email, files, messages) if the cloud provider locks you out overnight,
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to be able to port your data over if a cloud provider’s
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policies change seemingly overnight, or even to just respect
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[Microsoft’s shared responsibility model](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamentals/shared-responsibility)
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where you are responsible for your data’s safety and Microsoft only promises to take care of the infrastructure.
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Therefore, to ensure you and your data is always protected, set up regular backups!
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## How can Corso help?
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Backups can be complicated and, till recently, great backup solutions for Microsoft 365 might have been “enterprise”
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offerings that would cost many, many, MANY coffees a month. However, all of that's now behind us!
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We recently introduced Corso, a free, secure, and 100% open-source tool to let you create a backup of all your data in
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your Microsoft subscription. Backups go to a cloud storage provider of your choice, giving you fine-grained control of
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your data and independence from your primary cloud provider. Data is also compressed and deduplicated to reduce cost
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(pennies a month with systems such as AWS Glacier Instant Access) and encrypted with user-provided keys so that no one
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can see your data and that it's safe against hackers and ransomware.
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Corso is available now, and we’d love to hear your thoughts!
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Download it, [give it a try,](https://corsobackup.io/docs/intro/) and
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[join us on Discord](https://discord.gg/63DTTSnuhT) to let
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us know what you think.
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