Google PCA Practice Question: Managing Implementation and Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability
A company is designing a disaster recovery (DR) plan for their Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance. They need to recover the database to a specific point in time within the last 7 days, with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 1 hour. Which feature should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
PCA often tests the difference between HA (failover replica) and DR (PITR/backups) — the trap is choosing 'failover replica' because it sounds resilient, when it actually propagates logical corruption instead of enabling recovery to an earlier point.
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
✓
Point-in-time recovery (PITR)
Point-in-time recovery (PITR) for Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL lets you restore an instance to any specific timestamp within a configurable retention window (up to 7 days), using write-ahead log (WAL) archiving combined with automated backups. This directly satisfies the requirement to recover to a specific point in time within the last 7 days with an RPO under 1 hour, because WAL segments are continuously shipped and enable granular recovery. Automated backups alone only allow restore to the backup's snapshot time, which would not meet a sub-hour RPO.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Exporting the database daily to Cloud Storage
Why it's wrong here
Daily exports to Cloud Storage give a recovery point up to 24 hours old, breaching the sub-hour RPO, and restoring requires manual import rather than in-place rewind. They are tempting because exports are portable and cheap, and would be correct for long-term archival or migrating data between instances.
- ✓
Point-in-time recovery (PITR)
Why this is correct
PITR continuously archives transaction logs, letting Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL restore to any second within the retention window. This meets the sub-one-hour RPO and the seven-day recovery target, unlike daily automated backups, which cap recovery granularity at 24 hours.
- ✗
Failover replica
Why it's wrong here
A failover replica provides high availability by promoting a standby during a regional outage, but it cannot rewind to an arbitrary earlier timestamp. It is tempting because it protects against infrastructure failure, and would be correct for minimising downtime rather than recovering data lost to an accidental deletion.
- ✗
Automated backups only
Why it's wrong here
Automated backups capture daily snapshots, so the achievable recovery point is the last backup, exceeding the one-hour RPO, and they cannot target an arbitrary moment. They are tempting because they are the baseline data-protection mechanism, and would be correct where a daily RPO and whole-instance restore suffice.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Key term
RPO
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, defining how recent data must be to resume operations after a disruption.
Key term
Cloud SQL
Cloud SQL is a fully managed relational database service that lets you set up, maintain, and scale SQL databases (like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server) in the cloud without managing the underlying infrastructure.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Google Cloud exam blueprint
This PCA practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud 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 PCA exam.