From the AWS documentation

The physical block storage used by deleted EBS volumes is overwritten with zeroes before it is allocated to another account.

From an AWS rep on their forums.

I can confirm that when any customer volume is terminated (be it EBS or an instance storage volume) it is completely wiped before being made available for use by other customers.

If this is genuine and you really have someone else's data you need to get in touch with AWS. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

TLDR; I did two sets of tests and was unable to reproduce the results that @stevelandiss produced.

Update - test one

I tried this out myself. Here's what I did and my results.

TLDR; could not reproduce.

0) I allocated an m3.medium spot instance, with gp2 and io1 (provisioned IOPS) volumes, 10GB each. I used the standard Ubuntu 16.04 AMI (ami-b7a114d7). Note that I could not mount as /dev/xvdb as the OP suggested, AWS forced me to use longer names like /dev/xvdba which makes me slightly suspicious.

1) I installed photorec/testdisk

apt-get install testdisk

2) I used lsblk to look at the volumes available

lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT xvda 202:0 0 8G 0 disk └─xvda1 202:1 0 8G 0 part / xvdba 202:13312 0 10G 0 disk xvdbb 202:13568 0 10G 0 disk xvdca 202:19968 0 4G 0 disk

I tried to mount the disks just to check, but of course they have no file system so it failed mount /dev/xvdba /gp2/ mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/xvdba, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so.

3) I made file systems on each device

mkfs -t ext4 /dev/xvdba mke2fs 1.42.13 (17-May-2015) Creating filesystem with 2621440 4k blocks and 655360 inodes Filesystem UUID: e32b2ed1-a0f8-49df-895d-c56b9802a009 Superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632 Allocating group tables: done Writing inode tables: done Creating journal (32768 blocks): done Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done root@ip-11-0-2-184:/home/ubuntu# mkfs -t ext4 /dev/xvdbb mke2fs 1.42.13 (17-May-2015) Creating filesystem with 2621440 4k blocks and 655360 inodes Filesystem UUID: 4f1f7c75-bbce-4887-aac7-02e197a36c89 Superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632 Allocating group tables: done Writing inode tables: done Creating journal (32768 blocks): done Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

4) I mounted the disks

mount /dev/xvdba /gp2/ mount /dev/xvdbb /pio/

5) I ran photorec on each volume

photorec /dev/xvdba

GP2

IO1 provisioned IOPS

As you can see no files were found. If @stevelandiss can point out what he did differently I can try again to reproduce. For example he didn't mention any mounting, and he used a different device name. I'll try again without mounting a few minutes, but I want to save this update so I don't lose it.

Update - test two

This time I did much the same, but I didn't create a file system or mount the disk. This is closer to what to what @stevelandiss did. This made no difference, no files were recovered.

GP2

IO1 provisioned IOPS