The author is extremely lucky that support was able to find a snapshot for him after he deleted them all. I worked for AWS for many years and was a customer for years before that, and they were almost never able to recover deleted customer data. And this is on purpose: when a customer asks AWS to delete data, they want to assure the customer that it is, in fact, gone. That’s a security promise.

So the fact that they were able to do it for the author is both winning the lottery and frankly a little concerning.

What bothers me more is that the Terraform provider is deleting snapshots that are related to, but not, the database resource itself. Once a snapshot is made, that’s supposed to be decoupled from the database for infrastructure management purposes. That needs to be addressed IMO.

UPDATE: deleting previous automated snapshots on database instance or cluster deletion is default behavior in RDS; that’s not the TF provider’s fault. However, default RDS behavior on deletion is to create a final snapshot of the DB. Makes me wonder if that’s what support helped the author recover. If so, the author didn’t technically need support other than to help locate that snapshot.

And yes this is an object lesson of why human-in-the-loop is still very much needed to check the work of agents that can perform destructive actions.