AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on Azure VMs. They want to back up the VMs using Azure Backup. The retention requirements are: daily backups for 35 days, weekly backups for 52 weeks, and yearly backups for 10 years. Which backup policy should they create?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Azure Backup's default policy (which only covers short-term retention) with the ability to customize retention tiers, or mistakenly think Azure Site Recovery can serve as a backup solution for long-term retention, when in fact it is for replication and failover, not backup retention.
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
✓
Create a custom backup policy with a daily backup schedule and retention rules for daily (35), weekly (52), and yearly (10 years)
Azure Backup allows you to create a custom backup policy that defines a daily backup schedule and separate retention rules for daily, weekly, and yearly retention points. This directly meets the requirement of 35 days daily, 52 weeks weekly, and 10 years yearly retention, as Azure Backup supports granular retention policies with multiple tiers (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) within a single policy.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Create a custom backup policy with a daily backup schedule and retention rules for daily (35), weekly (52), and yearly (10 years)
Why this is correct
A custom backup policy in Azure Backup allows you to define a daily backup schedule and independent retention rules for each backup frequency. With the requested settings, daily restore points are kept for 35 days, weekly restore points for 52 weeks (one year), and yearly restore points for 10 years, all within Azure Backup's supported retention limits. This directly meets the compliance and recovery requirements by controlling both when backups are captured and how long each frequency tier is retained.
- ✗
Use the default backup policy provided by Azure Backup
Why it's wrong here
The default Azure Backup policy is an unconfigurable template that retains daily backups for only 30 days and weekly backups for 12 weeks (approximately 3 months), with no separate yearly retention rule. It cannot be adjusted to satisfy the 35-day daily, 52-week weekly, or 10-year yearly retention requirements. While convenient out of the box, the default policy lacks the granularity needed for this compliance scenario.
- ✗
Use Azure Site Recovery (ASR) to replicate the VMs and meet the retention
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a disaster-recovery service that continuously replicates VMs to a secondary region, but it is not a backup service and does not provide point-in-time restore points with configurable long-term retention. ASR keeps replicated data only for a short window (typically up to 15 days) and offers no ability to define daily, weekly, or yearly retention policies suitable for compliance archiving. It addresses regional availability but cannot replace Azure Backup for long-term retention and regulatory requirements.
- ✗
Use Azure Backup for VMs with instant recovery enabled
Why it's wrong here
Instant recovery for Azure VM backups leverages the managed disk snapshot created together with each backup to speed up restore operations, but it is a restore-enabling feature, not a retention policy. These snapshots are automatically deleted according to the backup policy's retention rules, and you cannot independently configure daily, weekly, or yearly retention on the instant recovery snapshot itself. Enabling instant recovery alone does not alter the retention schedule, so it fails to deliver the 35-day, 52-week, and 10-year retention required.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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