SAA-C03 Practice Question 19: Glacier Deep Archive Retention
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 2 · question 9 of 10
An insurance company scans signed contracts into PDFs of a few megabytes each and stores them in S3 Standard. Regulations require keeping every contract for 10 years. After the first 90 days, a contract is almost never read again. The only exception is an occasional auditor request, and the company's audit agreement allows up to 48 hours to produce a document.
Which approach meets the retention requirement at the lowest storage cost?
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Answer:
S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the lowest-cost storage in AWS. It is designed for data that is read less than once a year and kept for years to meet compliance requirements, which is exactly this workload. Deep Archive objects are archived, so reading one requires a restore request first. The Standard retrieval tier typically completes within 12 hours and the Bulk tier within 48 hours, so either fits the 48-hour audit window. The 180-day minimum storage duration does not matter when every object is kept for 10 years. The same lifecycle rule can also expire objects at the end of the retention period, so nobody has to delete them by hand.
Option A pays for a capability nobody needs. Glacier Instant Retrieval returns objects in milliseconds, but its storage price is higher than the archival classes. A 48-hour window does not justify instant access.
Option B works functionally, since Flexible Retrieval restores within minutes to 12 hours. But its storage price is higher than Deep Archive, so it is not the lowest-cost option, which is what the question asks for.
Option C is the most expensive option here and also weakens durability. One Zone-IA stores data in a single Availability Zone and costs far more per GB than any Glacier class. That is a poor choice for a 10-year regulatory record.
Reference: Understanding S3 Glacier storage classes for long-term data storage