AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company uses Azure Backup to protect their critical Azure VMs. An administrator accidentally deleted a file from one of the VMs. They need to restore that specific file quickly without restoring the entire VM. Which Azure Backup feature should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Azure Backup's file recovery with Azure Site Recovery, thinking both provide granular restore, but Site Recovery is for replication and failover, not for point-in-time file recovery from backups.
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
✓
Azure Backup file recovery
Azure Backup's file recovery feature allows you to mount a recovery point as a drive on the VM (or another machine) using iSCSI, enabling you to browse and copy individual files without restoring the entire VM. This is the correct choice because it meets the requirement for a quick, granular restore of a single deleted file.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure Backup full VM restore
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup full VM restore recreates the entire VM from a recovery point, including all disks, network settings, and system configuration, which is a time-consuming and resource-intensive operation. For recovering a single file, this approach is overkill and inefficient, as it requires a complete VM deployment or overwrite, potentially incurring downtime and additional costs, whereas file recovery is designed to give instant access to just the needed data.
- ✓
Azure Backup file recovery
Why this is correct
Azure Backup file recovery is the correct feature because it directly addresses the need for rapid, granular restoration. From the Recovery Services vault, you select a restore point and run a script that mounts that backup as an iSCSI drive on a chosen or existing VM, allowing you to browse and copy specific files or folders instantaneously. This read-only mount works for both Windows and Linux VMs and avoids any full VM restore overhead, making it the fastest way to recover a single file.
- ✗
Azure Site Recovery
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery is fundamentally a disaster recovery solution that continuously replicates entire Azure VMs to a secondary region for planned or unplanned failover, with orchestrated networking, replication, and recovery plans. It is not a backup-and-restore service for individual files; attempting to retrieve a single file from Site Recovery would require failing over an entire VM and then copying the file out of it, which introduces significant downtime, complexity, and cost. Azure Backup is the appropriate service for granular file-level recovery, whereas Site Recovery is designed to maintain business continuity at a site level.
- ✗
Azure Storage snapshots
Why it's wrong here
Azure Storage snapshots, such as managed disk snapshots, are point-in-time read-only copies of the underlying storage, but they are independent of Azure Backup and lack a centralized Recovery Services vault, backup policies, retention management, and role-based access control. To restore a file, you would need to manually share or attach a snapshot to a VM, which requires scripting and exposes a cumbersome process that doesn't scale for policy-based protection. Additionally, Azure Backup itself creates snapshots at the storage layer for speed, but the user-facing file recovery feature provides a much simpler and safer interface than raw snapshots.
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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.