I'm curious to know what everyones thoughts are regarding trusting storing the only copy of your data in S3, or the Relational Database Service which has its own set of backups (which apparently use S3).<p>The 99.9999999% durability is quite attractive but obviously that is only theoretical and doesn't include events such as serious bugs on their side, human error in deleting your account somehow or someone gaining access to your Amazon account through no fault of your own.<p>Note: I'm excluding the possibility of my own code deleting the data since we're using a read-only key for S3 and binary logs on RDS. Having my main account details stolen is obviously a risk too, but one that I'm ignoring in this discussion.
Why single out Amazon? You should have the same concerns with any provider. If you lose sleep because you are unsure of your provider then the only option is to host/manage/backup yourself. Regardless of who hosts it there will be human error and technical glitches. It isn’t about if something will happen it is when. Design in such a way as to minimize recovery time and effort. Plan for failure.