AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 357

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

Amazon RDS automated backups enable Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR), allowing a database to be restored to any specific second during the retention period (up to 35 days), which perfectly meets the 30-day and 5-minute recovery requirements. Manual snapshots do not support continuous point-in-time recovery and must be initiated manually. Read replicas and Multi-AZ deployments are designed for read scaling and high availability, respectively, and would actually replicate the accidental data deletion to the secondary instances rather than preventing or recovering from it.