AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
Your company has Azure virtual machines running a critical application. You need to back up these VMs daily and retain backups for 7 years. The solution must be cost-effective and support application-consistent backups. What should you use?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Azure Site Recovery (disaster recovery) with Azure Backup (backup), or assume that VM snapshots are sufficient for long-term retention, overlooking the need for application consistency and cost-effective lifecycle management.
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
Azure Backup is the correct choice because it provides a native, cost-effective backup solution for Azure VMs that supports application-consistent backups via the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for Windows and file-system-consistent backups for Linux. It allows you to configure a backup policy with daily backups and a retention duration of up to 99 years, easily meeting the 7-year requirement. Azure Backup also integrates with Azure Recovery Services vault, offering centralized management and long-term retention at a lower cost than other disaster recovery or snapshot-based approaches.
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
Why this is correct
Azure Backup is the native managed backup service for Azure VMs. It installs a backup extension on each VM and coordinates VSS (Volume Shadow Copy) on Windows or file-system-consistent snapshots on Linux, then transfers the VM's disks to a Recovery Services vault. It provides a configurable backup policy (daily or weekly) with long-term retention, and allows application-consistent, crash-consistent point-in-time restores of entire VMs or individual disks. Because it is fully managed and integrated with Azure Policy and monitoring, it is the correct choice for a critical application that needs reliable recoverability.
- ✗
Azure Files backup
Why it's wrong here
Azure Files backup protects Azure file shares, not virtual machines. While Azure Backup can be used to snapshot and recover an Azure Files share (with storage-account-level policies and share-level restores), it does not capture the guest OS, applications, or VM disks of an Azure VM, so it cannot restore the critical application or its VM. Using it for VM protection would be a mismatch because file-share backups are scoped to file-level data within Storage, not compute VM images.
- ✗
Azure Site Recovery
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a disaster-recovery service, not a backup service. It continuously replicates VMs from one Azure region to another to meet a low RPO (usually a few seconds or minutes), and it is designed for orchestrated failover and failback during a regional outage. It does not provide scheduled point-in-time recovery points with long-term retention, nor does it protect against data corruption or accidental deletion without additional backup. For a critical application, ASR complements but does not replace Azure Backup.
- ✗
Azure VM snapshots stored in Azure Storage
Why it's wrong here
Manually taking Azure VM snapshots to a storage account (or as managed disk snapshots) is an ad-hoc method, not a managed backup solution. Each snapshot captures a consistent state of the VM's disks at a specific instant, but there is no built-in policy engine, no Recovery Services vault integration, no monitoring or alerting, and no built-in lifecycle management for retention or deletion. You must script and manage the snapshots yourself, and snapshots are often not application-consistent unless you orchestrate quiescing the guest OS manually, making this approach prone to operator error and silent data loss.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Azure Database Migration Service
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.
Key term
Azure Backup Design
Azure Backup Design is the process of planning and configuring a reliable, cost-effective, and secure backup and recovery solution for workloads hosted in Microsoft Azure.
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Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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