SSCP Security Operations and Administration Practice Question
A company's backup strategy uses a full backup on Sundays and differential backups on other days. On Thursday, the storage system fails. How many backups are required to restore the data?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse differential backups with incremental backups, leading candidates to think they need all backups from Monday to Thursday (Option B) or all backups (Option D), when in fact only the full and the latest differential are required.
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
✓
Two (the full backup and the Thursday differential)
A differential backup copies all data changed since the last full backup. Therefore, to restore data on Thursday, you need the last full backup (Sunday) and the most recent differential backup (Thursday), which contains all changes from Sunday through Thursday. This totals two backups.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
One (the full backup only)
Why it's wrong here
The full backup alone is outdated; changes since Sunday would be lost.
- ✗
Five (the full backup and all differentials from Monday to Thursday)
Why it's wrong here
Only the latest differential is needed; earlier differentials are superseded.
- ✓
Two (the full backup and the Thursday differential)
Why this is correct
The full backup provides the baseline, and the Thursday differential contains all changes since Sunday.
- ✗
Six (all backups from Sunday to Thursday)
Why it's wrong here
This would be needed for incremental backups, not differential.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SSCP 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 SSCP exam.