AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs an application on Azure VMs that must be backed up according to regulatory compliance: daily backups retained for 30 days, weekly backups retained for 12 months, and yearly backups retained for 7 years. The backups must be stored in a secondary region for disaster recovery. They want to use Azure Backup for VMs. Which backup policy and storage configuration should they implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Azure Site Recovery (disaster recovery) with Azure Backup (long-term retention), or assume the default policy can be customized to include yearly retention without realizing it must be explicitly configured.
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
✓
Configure a backup policy in Azure Backup for VMs with daily, weekly, and yearly retention rules, and enable cross-region restore by using a Recovery Services Vault with geo-redundant storage.
Azure Backup for VMs allows you to create a custom backup policy with daily, weekly, and yearly retention points, meeting the regulatory requirements. By enabling cross-region restore (CRR) on a Recovery Services Vault configured with geo-redundant storage (GRS), backups are automatically replicated to a paired secondary region, providing disaster recovery without additional infrastructure.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Configure a backup policy in Azure Backup for VMs with daily, weekly, and yearly retention rules, and enable cross-region restore by using a Recovery Services Vault with geo-redundant storage.
Why this is correct
This is the correct approach because Azure Backup for VMs allows you to create a custom backup policy in a Recovery Services Vault, specifying multiple retention rules for daily, weekly, and yearly recovery points. The vault must be configured with geo-redundant storage (GRS), and you must enable the cross-region restore feature on the vault, which then permits restoring VM backups to the paired secondary Azure region for disaster avoidance. This combination meets the requirement for scheduled backups with long-term retention and off-region recoverability.
- ✗
Enable backup with Azure Backup using the default policy and select Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) for the Recovery Services Vault.
Why it's wrong here
Enabling Azure Backup with the default policy fails to meet the requirement because the default policy only retains daily backups for 30 days and does not include weekly or yearly retention points. Selecting Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) for the Recovery Services Vault adds storage redundancy and is necessary for cross-region restore, but it does not alter the retention schedule or create additional backup points. The default policy is a fixed baseline, not a policy that satisfies long-term retention for daily, weekly, and yearly recovery needs.
- ✗
Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate VMs to the secondary region and configure retention policies in the replication settings.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is designed for disaster recovery by continuously replicating VMs to a secondary region and performing failover, not for long-term backup retention. While ASR does create recovery points, its retention window is short (up to 24 hours for crash-consistent points in many configurations), and it does not support yearly retention points or separate backup schedules with daily, weekly, and yearly rules. Using ASR for this scenario is incorrect because it addresses business continuity but does not provide a maintainable backup archive with multi-year retention.
- ✗
Perform file-level backups using Azure Backup and store them in a separate storage account with read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS).
Why it's wrong here
Performing file-level backups with Azure Backup and storing them to a separate RA-GRS storage account does not provide a full VM recovery solution; it only protects individual files and folders, not the OS, application state, or bare-metal configuration. Moreover, Azure Backup does not natively support file-level backup as an alternative for VM backup, and manually managing retention rules in a separate storage account is not supported or practical for the given schedule. The correct service for full VM backup with custom retention and cross-region restore is Azure Backup using a Recovery Services Vault, not file-level copies.
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Key term
Data Replication Strategy
A data replication strategy is a plan for copying and synchronizing data across multiple locations to ensure availability, durability, and performance.
Key term
Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery is a Microsoft Azure service that keeps your business applications and data running by automatically replicating them to a secondary location and failing over if the primary site goes down.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-305 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft 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 AZ-305 exam.