ISC2 CC Business Continuity, DR & Incident Response Practice Question
A company's backup strategy involves daily full backups only. What is the primary risk associated with this approach?
⚠ Common exam trap
ISC2 often tests the distinction between RPO and RTO, and the trap here is that candidates assume the primary risk is a long RPO (Option A) because they think daily backups mean losing a day of data, but the question specifically asks about the primary risk of this approach, which is the long restore time impacting RTO.
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
✓
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) may be exceeded due to long restore
With daily full backups only, the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is effectively 24 hours, which may be acceptable depending on business requirements. However, the primary risk is that restoring from a single full backup can take a very long time, especially for large datasets, potentially exceeding the Recovery Time Objective (RTO). This is because full backups contain all data and must be restored entirely, unlike incremental or differential backups that allow faster recovery by restoring only changed blocks.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) may be too long
Why it's wrong here
A daily full backup gives an RPO of up to 24 hours, which might be acceptable depending on requirements; the primary risk is restore time, not RPO.
- ✓
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) may be exceeded due to long restore
Why this is correct
Restoring a full backup takes significant time, which may violate the RTO.
- ✗
High cost of backup storage
Why it's wrong here
While full backups use more storage, the primary risk is not cost but restore time.
- ✗
Data corruption could spread across backups
Why it's wrong here
Corruption risk exists but is not the primary risk of a full-backup-only strategy.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Risk Management and Security Controls
Key term
Business Continuity Planning
Business Continuity Planning is the process of creating a strategy to keep an organization's essential functions running during and after a major disruption.
Key term
Recovery
Recovery is the process of restoring systems, data, and operations after a security incident, failure, or disaster to return to normal functioning.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CC practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISC2 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 CC exam.