SAA-C03 Practice Question 24: AWS Backup Cross Region Copy
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 3 · question 4 of 10
A company runs its workload in us-east-1 on EC2 instances with EBS volumes, an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance, and an Amazon EFS file system. For disaster recovery, auditors want daily backups of all three kept for 35 days, with a copy of every backup stored in us-west-2.
The operations team wants to define this once, in a single managed service, and to have new resources included automatically when they are tagged. What should the architect use?
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Answer:
AWS Backup centralizes backup policy across services. One backup plan sets the schedule, the retention, and a copy to destination rule that sends each recovery point to a backup vault in another Region. Resources are assigned by tag, so anything tagged later is protected with no change to the plan. Amazon EBS, Amazon RDS DB instances, and Amazon EFS all support cross-Region copy in AWS Backup, so one plan covers all three resource types.
Option A covers only part of the estate. Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager automates EBS snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs. It can copy them to another Region, but it doesn't back up RDS or EFS, so two more mechanisms would be needed.
Option B assumes the snapshots sit in a bucket you control. EBS snapshots and RDS snapshots are stored by the services themselves and never appear as objects in any of your buckets, so there is nothing for S3 Cross-Region Replication to replicate.
Option D is the wrong kind of tool. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery continuously replicates servers so you can fail them over. It is not a backup service with 35-day retention, and it doesn't protect the managed RDS instance or the EFS file system as native resources.
References: Creating backup copies across AWS Regions; AWS Backup feature availability