&gt; Gain more experience in IT? I mean i&#x27;ve been at it professionally for 18 years soooo I guess it depends on what you consider &quot;a lot of experience&quot;<p>Experience is not measured in years but in what you learned in those years.<p>&gt; I get what you are saying. &quot;A disgruntled amazon employee could just delete the world&#x27;s data&quot; right?<p>No, that&#x27;s not what I was saying. It is absolutely incredible but you <i>again</i> manage to mis-interpret what I wrote. Really, how hard can this be, let me try once again:<p>An employee of a customer of Amazon could wipe the company data.<p>So if you &#x27;x&#x27; found a company &#x27;y&#x27; that employs an employee (&#x27;z&#x27;) then &#x27;z&#x27; can if given the right credentials do a ton of harm to your company. Note that the amazon employees are not even in this equation (they probably should be but they are a lesser threat assuming Amazon is set up properly).<p>&gt; Except for thats not the case. Its all stored in triplicate(at a minimum) across a vast number of independently available data centers.<p>You <i>really</i> should read up on codespaces.<p>&gt;  The durability guarantees are hard to fathom .<p>Yes, except when your data is <i>gone</i>. Then the durability guarantees matter not one single bit. Amazon can not protect against you or one of your employees wiping the data purposefully.<p>Directly from the Amazon docs:<p>&quot;When an object is deleted from Amazon S3, removal of the mapping from the public name to the object starts immediately, and is generally processed across the distributed system within several seconds. Once the mapping is removed, there is no external access to the deleted object. That storage area is then made available only for write operations and the data is overwritten by newly stored data.&quot;<p>&gt; Honestly I bet they&#x27;d have a hard time deleting data permanently even if they wanted to.<p>Apparently, you&#x27;re wrong about that. And it is quite logical from Amazons perspective that you are wrong about that. Otherwise how would their billing ever function. If you delete something there may be a very short period during which Amazon might be able to recover it if you asked nicely however I wouldn&#x27;t count and that depending on how important the data is you&#x27;re playing Russian Roulette here. And if you&#x27;re so sure the data can be recovered how come you directly contradict Amazon documentation on that very subject?<p>Glacier is another matter by the way, at least there you&#x27;ll be writing some code to delete a vault.<p>&gt; But once against I&#x27;m not advocating that you only store your data in one place. I&#x27;m just saying dollars to donuts you stored at least one copy of your data on s3, catastrophe has struck and only one copy of your data is left where do you think it is?<p>Yes, well, several instances that prove you wrong exist. Your next hire might prove you personally wrong.<p>Good to see you at least have a copy elsewhere, and nice to see you consider at least a possibility besides the technical ones.<p>&gt; I know where I am placing my bets.<p>You&#x27;re welcome to place your own bets any way you want. But the company you work for and the companies you found had better have a &#x27;oh shit we lost all our Amazon data&#x27; recovery plan in the vault and it had better be one that when tested holds water. Otherwise you too may one day start looking to outsource your troubles.<p>Mind you, I don&#x27;t actually have a problem with people that act in this way, they are more than happy to pay me my exorbitant fees when it comes to saving their hospital or company or whatever institution it is this week that manages to intersect paths with something they considered absolutely impossible right up until the moment that it happened.<p>But you at least will never ever be able to say you weren&#x27;t warned.