Amazon Elastic Beanstalk instance's non-persistent storage data recovery

Question

Last night there was an error on my EB instance. The instance was removed and a new one was added. Because of that I lost data from the non-persistent instance storage. I don't have a backup / snapshot. A big beginner's mistake.

My question: Is there any chance to recover the instance's data from 12 hours ago? Maybe with the help from the AWS staff?

Answer 1

When an instance is stopped or terminated, the ephemeral volumes are gone. Terminating an instance releases the hardware for use by another customer. Stopping an instance does the same thing -- that's part of why you don't pay for stopped instances. The same instance will actually come up on physically different hardware if stopped and started.

Aside from the documentation...

The data in an instance store persists only during the lifetime of its associated instance. If an instance reboots (intentionally or unintentionally), data in the instance store persists. However, data in the instance store is lost under the following circumstances:

• The underlying disk drive fails
• The instance stops
• The instance terminates

Therefore, do not rely on instance store for valuable, long-term data.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/InstanceStorage.html

...there are also numerous support forum posts on this topic, with responses by AWS personnel, indicating that the answer is "no."

Here's one example:

Once an instance that has Ephemeral (or Instance Store) volumes has been Stopped or Terminated, we are unable to recover the data that was on that volume. When you Stop or Terminate such an instance, those volumes are securely wiped and this is to ensure the security and confidentiality of your data that was on that volume.

This is as per: http://aws.amazon.com/instance-help/

And: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/InstanceStorage.html

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=501815&#501815

And another:

Ephemeral (instance-store data) is the local host's hard drive and when an instance is migrated (moved) to new hardware (from a stop/start) the ephemeral data is scrubbed as part of the process as the instance will have new ephemeral storage as part of the new host.

All that said, there is not any way to get the data back from the ephemeral location.

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=396680&#396680