AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
Your company has an Azure subscription with a single virtual network. You need to design a solution to back up Azure VMs to meet a 7-day retention policy. The backup data must be stored in a separate region for compliance. What should you use?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Azure Backup's default GRS with cross-region restore, assuming that GRS alone allows restoring in the secondary region, but without CRR enabled, the secondary region copy is only for durability and cannot be used for restore operations.
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 cross-region restore (CRR) enabled
Azure Backup with cross-region restore (CRR) enabled is the correct solution because it allows you to store backup data in a secondary Azure paired region, meeting the compliance requirement for separate region storage. CRR works by replicating the backup data from the default geo-redundant storage (GRS) in the primary region to the paired region, and then enabling you to restore VMs in that secondary region. With a 7-day retention policy, CRR supports restoring from the recovery point within that window, ensuring compliance 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.
- ✓
Azure Backup with cross-region restore (CRR) enabled
Why this is correct
Azure Backup with cross-region restore (CRR) enabled is the correct choice because it explicitly copies backup snapshots and vault-tier recovery points to a paired secondary region. With CRR, you can restore a VM from the secondary region's copy even if the entire primary region is inaccessible, providing true geo-resiliency. This feature must be enabled during the Azure Recovery Services vault creation and works alongside GRS, granting independent read access to the replicated backup data in the paired region.
- ✗
Azure Site Recovery with replication to a secondary region
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is not a backup service; it provides disaster recovery through continuous replication of VM disks to a secondary region, maintaining a warm standby. While ASR enables failover of the running workload, it does not offer point-in-time restore retention or a separate backup copy for archival, and it cannot restore individual files or tables from an accidental deletion scenario. Thus, even though it replicates to another region, it fails to meet the backup-drive recovery requirement.
- ✗
Azure File Share snapshots stored in a different region
Why it's wrong here
Azure File Share snapshots are designed exclusively for Azure Files and are stored as read-only versions of the file share within the same storage account and region as the source data. You cannot schedule or copy these snapshots to a different region independently; they are location-bound to the original share, which defeats the cross-region restore requirement. Moreover, the question is about a virtual machine, not an Azure file share, making this option entirely non-applicable.
- ✗
Azure Backup with default geo-redundant storage (GRS) in the same region
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup with default geo-redundant storage (GRS) in the same region replicates backup data to a paired region, but that replicated copy is not directly accessible for restore unless cross-region restore (CRR) is specifically enabled. GRS alone only provides durability and availability of backup data in the secondary region, not the ability to perform a restore from that secondary region. Therefore, while the backup vault's data is geo-redundant, the primary restore capability remains limited to the source region, which does not satisfy the cross-region restore requirement.
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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.