AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 443

A company runs a web application that is backed by Amazon RDS. A new database administrator caused data loss by accidentally editing information in a database table. To help recover from this type of incident, the company wants the ability to restore the database to its state from 5 minutes before any change within the last 30 days.
Which feature should the solutions architect include in the design to meet this requirement?

Answer options

• A. Read replicas
• B. Manual snapshots
• C. Automated backups
• D. Multi-AZ deployments

Correct answer: C

Explanation

RDS Automated backups enable Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR), which allows you to restore a database instance to any specific second within your retention period, up to the last 5 minutes of database activity. Manual snapshots only capture the database state at the exact moment they are taken and do not support granular point-in-time recovery. Read replicas and Multi-AZ deployments are designed for read scaling and high availability/disaster recovery, respectively, and cannot prevent or recover from accidental data modification.