Archived backups can stall recovery: a pre-mortem on air-gapped vaults and EBS Archive

AWS now allows EBS backups in a logically air-gapped vault to move to the EBS Snapshots Archive tier, which cuts storage costs sharply. A pre-mortem scenario shows the risk: an attacker with administrative access to the primary organization can encrypt production volumes after months of quiet access. The only clean recovery point was a monthly backup that had already moved to archive. Archived points cannot be copied to another vault or Region, and restores are limited to five concurrent operations per account, so recovery could take nearly nine days against a 24-hour target. The author argues the failure lay in a retention design that treated archive as only a cost tier when it also affects recovery time.