As someone who has lost data myself, i'm really sorry this happened to you. I refrained from commenting on your article originally, but you seem stuck in a mental state blaming AWS for deleting your "backups" that you established with "best practices".

But you need to be aware that you never had backups in the way most sysadmins mean. If i need a friend to take care of a loved one while i'm away, and my backup plan is having the same person take them care of them but in a different house or with a different haircut, that's no backup plan: that's bus factor = 1.

Backups mean having a second (or third, etc) copy of your data stored with a 3rd party. Backup assumes you have an original copy of the entirety of the data to begin with.

From this point, and i'm sorry it bit you like this, but you never followed any good sysadmin practices about backups and disaster recovery. I have no idea what AWS best practices say, but trusting a single actor (whether hardware manufacturer or services provider) with all your data has always been against the 3-2-1 golden rule of backups and what happened to you was inevitable.

Blame AWS all you want, but Google does exactly the same thing all the time, deleting 15-years-old accounts with all associated data with no recourse. Some of us thought the cloud was safe and had all their "cross-region" backups burn in flames in OVH Strasbourg.

We could never trust cloud companies, and some of us never did. I never trusted AWS with my data, and i'm sorry you made that mistake, but you may also take the opportunity to learn how to handle backups properly in the future and never trust a single egg basket, or whatever metaphor is more appropriate.

Good luck to you in the future!