CLF-C02 Practice Question 38: Long Term Archive Storage
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 4 · question 8 of 10
A bank must keep scanned loan documents for 10 years to satisfy regulators. The documents are almost never read, and when auditors do ask for one, the bank can take up to two days to produce it. Which Amazon S3 storage class stores these documents at the LOWEST cost?
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Answer:
S3 Glacier Deep Archive is designed for long-lived archive data that is accessed less than once a year, with retrieval times of hours. It is the lowest-cost storage class in S3. Objects must be restored before they can be read, and it has a 180-day minimum storage duration. Neither matters here: the documents stay for 10 years, and a retrieval measured in hours fits easily within the two days allowed.
Option A, S3 Standard-IA, gives millisecond access to data read about once a month. The bank would pay for immediate retrieval that it does not need. Option B, S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, is for archive data accessed about once a quarter that still needs millisecond access. It costs more to store than Deep Archive, and the bank does not need instant access. Option D, S3 One Zone-IA, keeps data in a single Availability Zone, so it is not resilient to losing that zone. That is a poor fit for the only copy of regulated records, and it is still priced for millisecond access.
Reference: Understanding and managing Amazon S3 storage classes