True. I get that you can blame someone for having no backups and yoloing their thing. But OP did so much right if the threat model doesn't involve "corporate behemoth anti-user automation nukes everything including backups".

Everyone saying "you should've had offsite backups" certainly has a point but 99% of the blame lies with AWS here. This entire process must've crossed so many highly paid "experts" and no one considered freezing an account before nuking it for some compliance thing.

It's just baffling.

Hope these cases will lead to more people leaving the clouds and going back to on-prem stuff.

It is worth saying that AWS educates people to behave like this.

In the last "mandatory education program" I participated, the AWS instructor laughed at the possibility of data loss.

Worth noting that's not the only way this can be a single point of failure, this one was an account breach:

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/code-spaces-demis...