title: Storing data on EC2 vs S3 in AWS
body: <p>I'm fairly new to AWS and am having trouble understanding what the best practice should be for hosting a product I'm developing...</p>
  
  <p>I have a tool I plan on running on an EC2 instance but it only needs to run a couple of times a year, the rest of the time I can have the instance stopped and not incur charges.  However the product utilizes quite a bit of data (approx 15 - 25 GB depending on the run).  I understand that S3 is meant for storing data long term.  But is there any reason why I can't just leave the data on an EC2 (even when it's stopped).  Or do I have to do manual copies from S3 every time I want to execute a run</p>