Considering how many EBS volumes there are, that is not that low of a percentage for us to see many cases. It happens and the case at that link is not the only one.
But that person didn't take the advice, he did not snapshot his EBS volumes to S3. It says it right there in the description (as well as in the user's guide): "The durability of your volume depends both on the size of your volume and the percentage of the data that has changed since your last snapshot."
(From http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/05/amazon_s3_reduce... )
EBS volumes have a theoretical "annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume."
(From http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ )
Considering how many EBS volumes there are, that is not that low of a percentage for us to see many cases. It happens and the case at that link is not the only one.
But that person didn't take the advice, he did not snapshot his EBS volumes to S3. It says it right there in the description (as well as in the user's guide): "The durability of your volume depends both on the size of your volume and the percentage of the data that has changed since your last snapshot."