I update a company website which recently began hosting with AWS. I am used to accessing the files via ftp using Filezilla. I have been thru several tutorials and finally was able to get Filezilla connected with an instance. But the files I used to see are not there. Please can anyone help me? I'm not an expert I just can't wrap my head around AWS despite reading their tutorials and also watching other tutorials. I just want to see the files, be able to download or upload them as I wish. thanks
This is most likely not as much of an AWS issue as it is an issue with the way that you expect the specific data on your instance to work.
That said, it's possible that you created the instance with an instance store-backed volume instead of an EBS-backed volume. The former of the two is ephemeral, which means that the data is not kept when you terminate or reboot the machine. The EBS volumes will keep the data, because there is a separate resource allocated in your account for the storage.
In order for someone to be able to help you here, can you give details on which AWS services you are using, which instance AMI you are using, and what you've done to manually keep it running.
Furthermore, I am not sure that stackoverflow is the right place for this. It may get more attention on ServerFault.