Cloud Digital Leader Google Cloud Products and Services Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Cloud Run

  Why it's wrong here

  Cloud Run is a serverless compute platform that executes stateless containers in response to HTTP requests or events; it has no capability to capture point-in-time disk images. Because it abstracts away the underlying infrastructure and ephemeral filesystem, it cannot serve as a backup or disaster recovery mechanism for an existing Compute Engine VM's persistent disks. Using it for backup would conflate application execution with data durability, which is not its intended role.

• ✓

  Persistent Disk snapshots

  Why this is correct

  Persistent Disk snapshots are the direct, native mechanism for backing up Compute Engine disks. A snapshot captures the exact state of a disk at a specific time, and subsequent snapshots are incremental, storing only changed blocks for cost efficiency. You can automate snapshot creation with Cloud Scheduler and the Cloud Pub/Sub notifications, or use the Backup and DR service, and these snapshots can be restored to create new disks or be used to migrate the VM to another region.

• ✗

  Dataflow

  Why it's wrong here

  Dataflow is a fully managed service for executing Apache Beam pipelines, designed for stream and batch data processing like ETL, real-time analytics, and data transformation. It does not interact with Compute Engine's storage layer to create disk images or recover boot volumes. Using Dataflow to back up a persistent disk would be impossible because Dataflow operates on data flowing through pipelines, not on raw block-level disk state, and it lacks APIs to snapshot or restore virtual disks.

• ✗

  Cloud SQL

  Why it's wrong here

  Cloud SQL is a managed relational database service that provides automatic backups, point-in-time recovery, and read replicas for its own database instances, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server. However, it is not a backup solution for Compute Engine instance disks; a Compute Engine VM's persistent disk may contain an entire operating system, application binaries, and arbitrary files, none of which Cloud SQL can capture. Even if the application uses Cloud SQL, the VM's boot and data disks remain outside Cloud SQL's backup domain.

• ✓

  Cloud Storage

  Why this is correct

  Cloud Storage is correct because Persistent Disk snapshots are stored in Cloud Storage, and by configuring the snapshot's storage location as a regional or multi-regional bucket in a different geographic area, you achieve cross-region disaster recovery. Snapshots are not stored inside the project's standard buckets by default, but you can choose a snapshot location that mirrors a multi-region, and use the Storage Transfer Service or object lifecycle policies to copy them to another region for enhanced durability. Cloud Storage itself is not the backup mechanism, but it is the underlying durable, highly available repository that makes snapshot-based DR feasible.

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