Is this the right way to get persistent storage in EC2?

Using S3 for persistent storage is what Amazon recommends. I'm not sure if you'd want to run a database instance on a volume provided this tool though.. That would probably be slow as balls..

What they recommend doing is backing up to S3, but running locally. In the case of databases, by saving the checkpoint files to S3.

RE: FuseOverAmazon - s3fs - Google Code