SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity Practice Question
An organization needs to back up an Amazon EFS file system daily and retain backups for 30 days. Which AWS service provides a managed backup solution for EFS?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) as a general-purpose backup tool, but DLM is strictly limited to EBS snapshots and AMIs, not EFS file systems.
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
✓
AWS Backup
AWS Backup is the correct answer because it is a fully managed, policy-based backup service that supports Amazon EFS natively. It allows you to define backup plans with daily schedules and retention rules (e.g., 30 days) without needing to manage any backup infrastructure or scripts. AWS Backup handles the lifecycle of backups, including incremental backups and automatic deletion of expired recovery points.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
AWS Backup
Why this is correct
AWS Backup is the correct service because it is the native, fully managed backup service designed specifically for Amazon EFS file systems. A backup plan schedules recurring EFS backups, stores them as recovery points, and applies configurable retention policies, including cross-region and cross-account copies. It also supports point-in-time restore, lifecycle rules that transition recovery points to cold storage, and integration with AWS Organizations for compliance. Thus AWS Backup provides the backup-with-retention capability the organization requires.
- ✗
Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM)
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) is incorrect because its policies are scoped exclusively to Amazon EBS snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs, not EFS file systems. A lifecycle policy can schedule EBS volume snapshots and enforce a retention count, but no equivalent policy type exists in DLM to back up EFS. EFS backups are instead handled by AWS Backup, so DLM cannot satisfy this backup requirement.
- ✗
EFS replication to another region
Why it's wrong here
EFS replication to another region is a continuous, asynchronous data replication feature designed for disaster recovery and failover, not for creating discrete backup points. It does not produce a scheduled, point-in-time restore history with retention windows; the destination file system always mirrors the current source state. Even if you disable replication, you only retain the latest replicated data without rollback capability, so replication cannot replace a true backup solution.
- ✗
S3 Lifecycle policies
Why it's wrong here
S3 Lifecycle policies only act on objects stored in Amazon S3 buckets by defining transitions to storage classes such as S3 Standard-IA or Glacier, or by setting expiration/removal actions. EFS is a managed NFS file system, not an object store, and S3 Lifecycle policies have no mechanism to reference or process EFS data. While EFS has its own Lifecycle Management to move files to Infrequent Access storage, that is not backup and offers no retention or restore capabilities.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
One of 1,169 original SOA-C02 practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SOA-C02 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 SOA-C02 exam.