Are files in public directory lost when scaling Laravel application on Elastic Beanstalk?

I have a Laravel application deployed on Elastic Beanstalk. I saw that changes made via FTP/SSH are lost when the application scales and creates new instances. In my application the user can upload pictures which are stored in the laravel Public directory. Will these images be lost when the application scales to new instances?

Should I use S3 or use an EC2 instance instead?

via Chebli Mohamed