I dislike cloud hosting because of hacking but AWS should be pretty bullet proof when it comes to redundancy and backup. It's a breeze to do a lot of things that are near impossible or very resource intensive with a more classic setup. If it's just a matter of technicality or SLA confusion because he didn't "tick the right checkbox" in his CP or assumed it was part of the service then I feel sorry for the guy. Having said that I reckon Amazon would keep a copy of everything that's content on their platforms internally so the data would have to be somewhere.
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/
https://aws.amazon.com/backup/