Oh, I wasn't suggesting pretending it's a file system - I had been thinking of a place to dump the data for backups, thinking fresh instances + fresh EBS would

Oh, I wasn't suggesting pretending it's a file system - I had been thinking of a place to dump the data for backups, thinking fresh instances + fresh EBS would solve the problem. I think you answered this already in the other post - that you booted a new instance and a new EBS with some backup and the problem remained?? This seems like such a horrendous failure on AWS' part, unless it has something to do with how you are accessing the EBS (too many connections or something). I could understand if a given EBS fails, but if you can restore the data from an independent backup and spin back up with new instances and new EBS this indicates a very concerning systemic problem in EBS!