When deleting a large chunk of data from Amazon S3, AWS struggles a bit with figuring out how much you actually owe.

We at Mediafly deleted ~30% of the tens of terabytes of data from one of our AWS accounts yesterday. One would expect the appropriate cost graph to drop ~30% as well. However, this (obfuscated) chart, output from our installation of Netflix Ice, the excellent open source tool contributed by Netflix, appears as if we outright deleted all content from our S3 bucket.

Seeing this graph raised some alarms (“oh crap! Did we just delete everything??”), but thankfully the reality does not match what was depicted here. Time will tell when and how that information is updated, however.