COF-C03 Account Management and Data Governance Practice Question
Which of the following describes the purpose of 'Time Travel' from a data governance perspective?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Time Travel with disaster recovery or full system backups, failing to recognize that its primary design purpose is the quick recovery of accidentally deleted, updated, or dropped database objects.
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
✓
To provide a mechanism for restoring deleted or altered data.
Time Travel allows for the recovery of data that was accidentally deleted or modified, serving as a critical safety net for data governance. By enabling the retention of historical data, Snowflake empowers administrators to restore states after human error, minimizing data loss and operational downtime. This functionality is essential for maintaining data integrity and business continuity, ensuring that the organization can reliably recover from unintended data lifecycle events without needing to restore from full backups.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
To improve query performance by caching historical results.
Why it's wrong here
Time Travel is not related to query result caching. Result caching is handled by the result set cache, which stores results for 24 hours to improve performance. Time Travel is specifically for data recovery and historical analysis by allowing access to data states as they existed at a previous point.
- ✓
To provide a mechanism for restoring deleted or altered data.
Why this is correct
Time Travel enables users to query data as it existed at any point within the retention period. This allows for the easy recovery of dropped tables or modified rows, providing an essential layer of protection against accidental data loss and supporting organizational data integrity and compliance requirements.
- ✗
To hide sensitive data from users who do not have access.
Why it's wrong here
Time Travel has no role in hiding data. It provides access to data that may have been deleted, which could potentially expose data that an administrator intended to remove. It is a recovery tool, not a security or access control mechanism for restricting data visibility in Snowflake.
- ✗
To manage the lifecycle of virtual warehouses automatically.
Why it's wrong here
Virtual warehouse management is handled by auto-suspend and auto-resume settings. Time Travel has no control over compute resources or warehouse states. Its scope is restricted to data retention and recovery within databases, tables, and schemas, and it has no impact on the compute infrastructure of the account.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Snowflake exam blueprint
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