Amazon AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional Exam: Retaining and Copying Snapshots

Retaining and Copying Snapshots

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Question

A communication company has deployed several EC2 instances in region ap-southeast-1 which are used to monitor user activities.

The AWS administrator has configured an EBS lifecycle policy to create a snapshot every day for each EBS volume to preserve data.

The retention is configured as 5, which means the oldest snapshot will be deleted after 5 days.

The administrator plans to copy some snapshots manually to another region ap-southeast-2 as these snapshots contain some important data.

Can these snapshots be retained?

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

Correct Answer - C.

Copying a snapshot to a new Region is commonly used for geographic expansion, migration, disaster recovery, etc.

EBS snapshots' lifecycle policies contain some rules.

One of the rules is that when you copy a policy's snapshot, the new copy is not influenced by the retention schedule.

Option A is incorrect: Because the new snapshots will be kept.

Option B is incorrect: Because no matter the new snapshots are in the same region or not, they can be retained.

Option C is CORRECT: Because the new snapshots are not affected by the original policy.

Reference is in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/snapshot-lifecycle.html.

Option D is incorrect: Because there is no delete protection option for snapshots.

The retention policy of the EBS lifecycle policy is set to create a snapshot every day for each EBS volume, and retain them for five days. This means that after five days, the oldest snapshot will be deleted automatically by AWS.

Now, the administrator wants to copy some snapshots manually to another region ap-southeast-2 as they contain important data. The question is whether these manually copied snapshots can be retained or not.

Option A is incorrect because the new snapshots that are manually copied to ap-southeast-2 are not affected by the retention policy of the EBS lifecycle policy in ap-southeast-1. The retention policy only applies to snapshots created by the EBS lifecycle policy, not to manually created snapshots.

Option B is incorrect because the retention policy of the original snapshots is not carried over to the copied snapshots. The copied snapshots are treated as new snapshots in ap-southeast-2 and are not affected by the retention policy of ap-southeast-1. Therefore, the copied snapshots can be retained.

Option C is correct. The retention schedule of the EBS lifecycle policy is not carried over to the copied snapshots, so they can be retained for as long as desired.

Option D is incorrect because the retention policy of the EBS lifecycle policy only applies to snapshots in ap-southeast-1, and not to snapshots that are manually copied to ap-southeast-2.

In summary, option C is correct. The new snapshots that are manually copied to ap-southeast-2 can be retained as the retention schedule of the EBS lifecycle policy is not carried over to the copied snapshots.