I recently came across a post from an open-source developer I admire, who faced a devastating situation: AWS deleted his account that he had for ten years, along with all his vital data, due to a verification issue. This incident took place after an exhausting 20 days of support runaround, where he received no clear answers and encountered a total lack of proper resolution. To compound matters, this occurred on his birthday. It's heartbreaking that a dedicated contributor to the open-source community, who had consistent backups and paid his bills, could lose everything over a misunderstanding related to third-party payments. How does a company like AWS justify such an action? What kind of process leads to the loss of a decade's worth of work and ongoing poor communication?
2 Answers
It's really worrying how a few companies control so much of our digital lives. It feels like they can do whatever they want with our data and there's little accountability. This situation really highlights how vulnerable we are to their decisions.
I had a client who faced a similar fate with AWS. They deleted an RDS instance for a late payment, insisting they leave a final backup, but they didn't actually do it. Now I store all important backups with a different cloud provider just to avoid these kinds of situations. It's scary how easily they can erase everything.
Right? After that incident, I completely agree with you. It's better to have backups stored elsewhere. Can't trust AWS to keep our data safe.