For those using AWS -- check out the email I got from them last night. Can anyone say cyber attack? As crappy as this is, I would have loved to see the explosion. I suppose if it was going to fail it's better to fail hard, really hard. If you're using AWS for self-hosting... make sure you've got a backup! --- Your volume experienced a failure due to multiple failures of the underlying hardware components and we were unable to recover it. Although EBS volumes are designed for reliability, backed by multiple physical drives, we are still exposed to durability risks caused by concurrent hardware failures of multiple components, before our systems are able to restore the redundancy. We publish our durability expectations on the EBS detail page here (http://aws.amazon.com/ebs). Sincerely, EBS Support

Dang - hope you had a local copy. I'd be pissed.

Crazy... always back up, I back up EVERYTHING (Databases/files) twice a month onto my computer and external. I had to learn the hard way.. best of luck mate, thanks for the warning. David

Ouch. Not Good. Good luck to your speedy recovery!! Cheers! -- Smug

I'd be way upset. They should account for all the possible ways the thing can fail, and make sure they have redundancy built in...even for multiple failures. I'm in the IT business, and we routinely test for double failures in our systems...that's one of the tenants of high availability. I'm going to use this example in a conference session I'm doing in October on high availability...cool? Mark

@GoNorthWest - sure go nuts. Fortunately, I'm using AWS for work other than Buzztouch, and wasn't running anything at the time. It's just a small annoyance. Still, I was just shocked that something like this could happen. I'd always assumed Cloud Storage was the safest way to store data and my multiple hardrives where basically unnecessary. Apparently Dropbox uses AWS for their storage. I assume they have greater redundancy than I did... but you never know.

Wow, really sorry to hear that Iaxia... You guys all seem to back up, stupid question: how do you go about backing things up? I mean, I save in two locations the projects I download but what about the self hosted stuff, the database? Farcat

I use DropBox for all my app projects, and tons of other things. Not only does everything get stored in the DropBox cloud, which comes with the ability to undelete older versions, but there are also local copies of everything everywhere I have the DropBox software installed. So, I have DropBox running on two PCs and one Mac, which gives me four total copies of the files! For all the pictures I take with my DSLR, I back those up, usually on a monthly basis, to a couple external hard drives. Mark