title: EC2 / LAMP with a temporary File System
body: <p>Ok - this is a weird one.</p>
  
  <p>I've now got my domain pointing to a new EC2 instance running our website, but initially I thought I had some issues with file permissions, has now turned to be where the web service is holding a completely separate file system layer on top of the one already in place.</p>
  
  <p>What do I mean? Any file I upload to the site, or that I create using <code>file_put_contents()</code> is not accessible if I SSH in to the server. Completely invisible.  This is a big problem for me, as I have got jobs on cron on the root user which is designed to look for these files and perform whatever jobs it needs to.</p>
  
  <p>If I restart the apache2 service - the files that had been created in that session are reset, as if they were never there in the first place.  Even if I don't restart the session - I have no way of accessing these file again - though it would probably only work if I redirect it as a file download.  As far as PHP is concerned, they are in <code>scandir()</code>, true for <code>file_exists()</code> etc.</p>
  
  <p>Has anyone had any familiarity with this and know how I can disable it so it behaves as normal?  On my research, it sounds similar to EFS, but have no idea to turn that off, let alone turn it on.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>