AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions 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.

• ✓

  A

  Why this is correct

  Azure Backup for SQL Server in an Azure VM securely stores full, differential, and transaction log backups in a Recovery Services vault. You can configure the vault in West Europe as the primary region and enable the Cross-Region Restore (CRR) feature, which replicates the backup data to the paired North Europe region using geo-redundant storage (GRS). This design provides automated SQL-aware backup management, point-in-time restore capability, and the ability to restore databases in North Europe without deploying any additional backup infrastructure or vaults, making it the optimized, cost-effective approach.

• ✗

  B

  Why it's wrong here

  Creating a second Recovery Services vault in North Europe and backing up to both vaults substantially increases operational overhead and storage cost because the same SQL Server databases would be protected twice. The SQL IaaS Agent extension registers the VM with a single vault; backing up to a second vault requires a second backup schedule and duplicate metadata, and you still need to enable cross-region restore anyway to meet the DR objective. Azure Backup's built-in CRR already replicates the same vault data to North Europe, so a separate vault adds unnecessary complexity with no additional resilience benefit.

• ✗

  C

  Why it's wrong here

  Manually copying .bak files (or using SQL Server Managed Backup to a storage account) to a North Europe storage account is a fragile, labor-intensive process that requires custom scripts, scheduling, and monitoring to stay current with the transaction log chain. Unlike Azure Backup, which orchestrates backups, verifies consistency, and manages retention automatically, a manual copy introduces a significant window of data loss between copies, risks corruption or incomplete file sets, and does not provide a native restore experience. This approach is not scalable for production SQL Server workloads and lacks the built-in cross-region restore capabilities that are available with a Recovery Services vault.

• ✗

  D

  Why it's wrong here

  Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a disaster-recovery service that replicates entire VMs for failover, not a backup service for SQL Server databases. ASR recovery points are snapshots of the entire VM with limited retention (typically up to 72 hours), and it does not support SQL Server–consistent point-in-time restore or long-term retention of transaction log backups. While ASR could be used alongside Azure Backup, it cannot replace it, and mixing the two does not address the requirement for long-term backup retention with cross-region restore. The correct service for database-level backup, log chains, and retention is Azure Backup, not ASR.