AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 967

A Solutions Architect must create a cost-effective backup solution for a company's 500MB source code repository of proprietary and sensitive applications. The repository runs on Linux and backs up daily to tape. Tape backups are stored for 1 year.
The current solution is not meeting the company's needs because it is a manual process that is prone to error, expensive to maintain, and does not meet the need for a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 hour or Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 2 hours. The new disaster recovery requirement is for backups to be stored offsite and to be able to restore a single file if needed.
Which solution meets the customer's needs for RTO, RPO, and disaster recovery with the LEAST effort and expense?

Answer options

• A. Replace local tapes with an AWS Storage Gateway virtual tape library to integrate with current backup software. Run backups nightly and store the virtual tapes on Amazon S3 standard storage in US-EAST-1. Use cross-region replication to create a second copy in US-WEST-2. Use Amazon S3 lifecycle policies to perform automatic migration to Amazon Glacier and deletion of expired backups after 1 year.
• B. Configure the local source code repository to synchronize files to an AWS Storage Gateway file Amazon gateway to store backup copies in an Amazon S3 Standard bucket. Enable versioning on the Amazon S3 bucket. Create Amazon S3 lifecycle policies to automatically migrate old versions of objects to Amazon S3 Standard - Infrequent Access, then Amazon Glacier, then delete backups after 1 year.
• C. Replace the local source code repository storage with a Storage Gateway stored volume. Change the default snapshot frequency to 1 hour. Use Amazon S3 lifecycle policies to archive snapshots to Amazon Glacier and remove old snapshots after 1 year. Use cross-region replication to create a copy of the snapshots in US-WEST-2.
• D. Replace the local source code repository storage with a Storage Gateway cached volume. Create a snapshot schedule to take hourly snapshots. Use an Amazon CloudWatch Events schedule expression rule to run an hourly AWS Lambda task to copy snapshots from US-EAST -1 to US-WEST-2.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Option B is correct because AWS Storage Gateway file gateway allows local file synchronization directly to Amazon S3, enabling immediate offsite backup and granular single-file recovery to meet the 2-hour RTO. Using S3 versioning combined with lifecycle policies meets the 1-hour RPO requirement cost-effectively without the overhead of snapshot replication or VTL management. Options A, C, and D are incorrect because virtual tape libraries and volume snapshots do not easily support single-file recovery, and they introduce unnecessary complexity and higher costs for a small 500MB repository.