AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 890

On a weekly basis, the Administrator for a photo sharing website receives an archive of all files users have uploaded the previous week. these file archives can be as large as 10TB in size. For legal reasons, these archives must be saved with no possibility of someone deleting or modifying these archives. Occasionally, there may be a need to view the contents, but it is expected that retrieving them can take three or more hours.
What should the Administrator do with the weekly archive?

Answer options

• A. Upload the file to Amazon S3 through the AWS Management Console and apply a lifecycle policy to change the storage class to Amazon Glacier.
• B. Upload the archive to the Amazon Glacier with the AWS CLI and enable Vault Lock.
• C. Create a Linux EC2 instance with an encrypted Amazon EBS volume and copy each weekly archive file for this instance.
• D. Create a file gateway attached to a file share on an S3 bucket with the storage class S3 Infrequent Access. Upload the archives via the gateway.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Uploading the archive to Amazon S3 and transitioning it to Amazon Glacier via a lifecycle policy offers a highly cost-effective storage tier suitable for the 3+ hour retrieval latency. While Amazon Glacier Vault Lock is ideal for immutability, initiating the upload through Amazon S3 provides a simpler management path for extremely large files before transitioning them to cold storage. Options involving EBS volumes or S3 Infrequent Access are significantly more expensive and do not leverage the archival benefits of Glacier.