SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question
A media company stores original uploads in an S3 bucket. They must recover from accidental overwrites/deletes and also recover quickly from a full Region outage. The required RPO is about 1 hour. Which configuration best meets these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often assume CRR alone is sufficient for data protection, overlooking that without versioning, overwrites and deletes are permanent and cannot be recovered, which directly violates the requirement to recover from accidental overwrites/deletes.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Enable S3 versioning and configure cross-Region replication to a bucket in another Region.
Enabling S3 versioning protects against accidental overwrites and deletes by preserving all object versions, while cross-Region replication (CRR) asynchronously replicates objects to a bucket in another Region, enabling recovery from a full Region outage. With an RPO of about 1 hour, CRR meets this requirement as replication typically completes within minutes to a few hours, and versioning ensures point-in-time recovery of previous object states.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable an S3 lifecycle policy to transition objects to Glacier after 7 days without enabling versioning.
Why it's wrong here
Lifecycle tiering supports storage cost management, not immediate recovery from deletes/overwrites.
- ✗
Enable S3 cross-Region replication (CRR) but leave the bucket without versioning enabled.
Why it's wrong here
CRR generally requires versioning; without it, recovery from overwrites/deletes is not reliably supported.
- ✓
Enable S3 versioning and configure cross-Region replication to a bucket in another Region.
Why this is correct
Versioning enables recovery from accidental overwrites/deletes, and CRR provides near-current copies for Region-level disaster recovery.
- ✗
Rely on frequent EBS snapshots of a temporary cache used during uploads.
Why it's wrong here
EBS snapshots do not protect the source S3 objects and do not provide S3-level overwrite/delete recovery.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAA-C03 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SAA-C03 exam.