AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) — Question 382

A company maintains information on premises in approximately 1 million.csv files that are hosted on a VM. The data initially is 10 TB in size and grows at a rate of 1 TB each week. The company needs to automate backups of the data to the AWS Cloud.

Backups of the data must occur daily. The company needs a solution that applies custom filters to back up only a subset of the data that is located in designated source directories. The company has set up an AWS Direct Connect connection.

Which solution will meet the backup requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Use the Amazon S3 CopyObject API operation with multipart upload to copy the existing data to Amazon S3. Use the CopyObject API operation to replicate new data to Amazon S3 daily.
• B. Create a backup plan in AWS Backup to back up the data to Amazon S3. Schedule the backup plan to run daily.
• C. Install the AWS DataSync agent as a VM that runs on the on-premises hypervisor. Configure a DataSync task to replicate the data to Amazon S3 daily.
• D. Use an AWS Snowball Edge device for the initial backup. Use AWS DataSync for incremental backups to Amazon S3 daily.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

AWS DataSync is designed to automate and accelerate data transfers between on-premises storage and Amazon S3 over AWS Direct Connect, natively supporting directory-level filtering. Using a DataSync agent VM requires minimal operational overhead compared to writing custom scripts with S3 APIs or managing physical Snowball Edge hardware when a dedicated network connection is already available. AWS Backup does not natively support direct, file-level filtering of on-premises VM directories to S3 with the same ease as DataSync.