PK0-005 Practice Question: Basics of IT Infrastructure and IT Project Management
A project to implement a new backup solution. Which THREE components are essential for a comprehensive backup strategy? (Choose three.)
⚠ Common exam trap
The PK0-005 exam often tests the distinction between 'essential components' (like retention policy, scheduling, and off-site storage) and 'optional enhancements' (like compression and replication), leading candidates to mistakenly include replication as a core requirement when it is actually a separate disaster recovery technique.
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
✓
Retention policy
A retention policy (A) is essential because it defines how long each backup generation is kept and when it can be expired or overwritten, which directly governs recoverability to specific points in time and compliance with data-retention requirements. Backup scheduling (D) is essential because it determines the frequency and timing of full, incremental, or differential jobs, ensuring the RPO (recovery point objective) is actually met. Off-site storage (E) is essential because it provides geographic separation from the primary site, protecting backups against site-wide disasters such as fire, flood, or ransomware that could destroy locally stored copies. Compression (B) is only an optimization that reduces storage and bandwidth consumption, and replication (C) is a redundancy/availability technique; neither is required for a backup strategy to be comprehensive, since backups can function without them.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Retention policy
Why this is correct
A retention policy defines how long each backup generation is kept and when it expires, governing recovery point objectives and compliance obligations. Without it, backups accumulate indefinitely or are deleted prematurely, undermining the strategy's restorability.
- ✗
Compression
Why it's wrong here
Compression reduces backup size and transfer time, but it is a storage-efficiency technique, not a component of backup strategy scope. The stem asks which elements make a strategy comprehensive — coverage, scheduling and restoration — not how data is encoded. Compression would be the right answer if the question asked how to minimise backup storage footprint or bandwidth consumption.
- ✗
Replication
Why it's wrong here
Replication copies data continuously to a second location, but it propagates deletions and corruption rather than retaining earlier versions, so it cannot restore data lost hours or days ago. It is tempting because replication supports disaster recovery and high availability, and would be the right choice when the requirement is failover to a standby site, not point-in-time recovery.
- ✓
Backup scheduling
Why this is correct
Backup scheduling automates when copies run, satisfying the requirement for consistent, repeatable protection without manual intervention. It defines frequency and timing, ensuring recovery point objectives are met across the solution. Combined with storage and verification components, scheduling forms an essential pillar of a comprehensive strategy.
- ✓
Off-site storage
Why this is correct
Off-site storage satisfies the geographic separation constraint by holding replicated backup copies at a distant location, protecting recovery data from site-wide disasters such as fire, flood or theft that would destroy on-site media. Combined with local backups, it ensures a viable restore point survives even total loss of the primary facility.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every PK0-005 question from scratch — 954 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PK0-005 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA 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 PK0-005 exam.