AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
A company wants to implement a backup strategy for their Azure virtual machines. They need to retain backups for 7 years for compliance and ensure backups are encrypted at rest. Which solution should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Azure Site Recovery (disaster recovery) with Azure Backup (long-term backup), or assume that disk snapshots with lifecycle management can achieve 7-year retention, but snapshots have a maximum retention of 5 years and lack the integrated encryption and compliance features of Azure Backup.
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 with a vault configured for 7-year retention and encryption at rest.
Azure Backup is the correct solution because it provides long-term retention (up to 99 years) and supports encryption at rest using platform-managed keys (PMK) or customer-managed keys (CMK). It meets the 7-year compliance requirement and ensures backups are encrypted by default using Azure Storage Service Encryption (SSE).
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 Disk Snapshot with a lifecycle management policy.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Disk Snapshots are point-in-time, crash-consistent copies of a managed disk, but they are not a managed backup service. They lack centralized monitoring, long-term archival tiers, and are limited to 500 snapshots per disk, making 7-year retention impractical. Lifecycle management policies can only automate deletion (and possibly tiering) for blob storage, but not provide backup vault features like geo-restore or encryption at rest. Thus snapshots are unsuitable for a multi-year backup strategy.
- ✓
Azure Backup with a vault configured for 7-year retention and encryption at rest.
Why this is correct
Azure Backup with a Recovery Services vault is the correct service for long-term VM backup, supporting retention up to 10 years (or 7 years easily) with flexible weekly/monthly/yearly retention policies. Backups are application-consistent using VSS on Windows and file-system-consistent on Linux, with encryption at rest using platform-managed keys and secure network access via private endpoints. The vault stores recovery points across regions if you enable cross-region restore, providing the durability and compliance needed for keeping backups for 7 years.
- ✗
Azure Files Backup to a Recovery Services vault.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Files Backup to a Recovery Services vault is a solution for backing up Azure file shares, not for virtual machines. It cannot restore a VM's operating system disk or data disks because it only stores file-share snapshots and transaction logs. For VM backup, you need Azure Backup's VM backup feature, which captures full VM state and supports disk-level restore. Therefore this option is invalid for a VM backup strategy.
- ✗
Azure Site Recovery with custom retention policies.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery is a disaster-recovery solution that replicates VMs to a secondary region for planned failover and rapid recovery, not a long-term backup archive. Its recovery points are continuously created and retained only for a short window (typically up to 24 or 72 hours), which cannot satisfy a 7-year retention requirement. Custom retention policies in Site Recovery do not extend to multi-year archival; they only influence the replication frequency and point-in-time recovery within that short window. Hence it is incorrect for this backup scenario.
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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.