AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 389

A company is using an Amazon S3 bucket to store data uploaded by different departments from multiple locations. During an AWS Well-Architected review, the financial manager notices that 10 TB of S3 Standard storage data has been charged each month. However, in the AWS Management Console for Amazon S3, using the command to select all files and folders shows a total size of 5 TB.
What are the possible causes for this difference? (Choose two.)

Answer options

• A. Some files are stored with deduplication.
• B. The S3 bucket has versioning enabled.
• C. There are incomplete S3 multipart uploads.
• D. The S3 bucker has AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) enabled.
• E. The S3 bucket has Intelligent-Tiering enabled.

Correct answer: B, C

Explanation

The discrepancy occurs because Amazon S3 bills for non-current object versions and incomplete multipart uploads, neither of which are visible when simply selecting all active files and folders in the standard S3 console view. Enabling versioning retains older versions of files that accumulate storage charges, while incomplete multipart uploads consume storage space and incur costs until they are explicitly aborted or completed. Other options like KMS encryption, deduplication (which S3 does not natively perform to reduce billed size this way), and Intelligent-Tiering do not account for this specific type of hidden storage discrepancy.