Sounds like he did not make S3 snapshots of his EBS volumes. Ouch. I feel very confident about the robustness of data that I store on AWS because I can make an S3 snapshot, and recover from that snapshot on a fresh EC2 to test the backup. BTW, I changed the way I use AWS: now I always make bootable EBS images, increasing the size > the 10 GB limit so I snapshot my OS setup and data and apps all at the same time.