Preventing media folder in Django from being overwritten with new update - django

Question

I have a Django model which includes an Image Field, and an app which consumes the model instance including all images. The problem I'm having now is while my data and the img local link resides on my AWS RDS database, the media folder which contains the images for the model is not. Thus every time I deploy a new version of the app (I'm using Beanstalk for deployment), my media folder is wiped clean and all my image link dies as a result.
Below is my model:
class Item(models.Model):
# Fields
name = models.CharField(max_length=30, help_text="Enter item name")
description = models.TextField(help_text='Enter a short description')
image = models.ImageField(help_text='Upload item image', upload_to='image/item/',
default='image/demo.jpg')
# Methods
def __str__(self):
return str(self.name)
def get_absolute_url(self):
return reverse('model-detail-view', args=[str(self.id)])
And I use serve to retrieve the image from Django.
url(r'^resource/(?P<path>.*)$', serve, {'document_root': settings.MEDIA_ROOT}),
Now what would be the best way to resolve this problem? I would not want to upload the image to another server then link back to Django, it's best if I can save it to my database the moment I upload the file from my model form.
All feedback is appreciated.

Answer 1

See the EB documentation on design considerations:
Elastic Beanstalk applications run on Amazon EC2 instances that have no persistent local storage. When the Amazon EC2 instances terminate, the local file system is not saved, and new Amazon EC2 instances start with a default file system.
So, you cannot do what you are asking. You must upload the files to a persistent storage system; S3 is the obvious choice.