In case you missed it, check the comments in this link [http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CommentView.aspx?guid=f8e678cc-045a-4316-917d-21b6754741ba#commentstar

In case you missed it, check the comments in this link [http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CommentView.aspx?guid=f8e678cc-045a-4316-917d-21b6754741ba#commentstart http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CommentView.aspx?guid=f8e6...], discussed here [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33093 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33093]. The suggestion is to constantly write db logs from EC2 to S3 instead of nightly backup, so that in the event of a crash you're only likely to lose minutes worth of data. Also note that you can restart instances with no loss of data. Its only in failures that you would lose data.