Question #1278
A company is implementing data retention policies for their Amazon RDS databases. They need to ensure that daily automated backups are retained for exactly 2 years and can be restored when needed. Which solution meets these requirements?
Use AWS Backup to create a backup plan with daily backups and a retention rule set to 2 years. Assign the RDS instances to this plan.
Enable automated backups on RDS with a retention period of 2 years and configure Amazon S3 lifecycle policies to archive the backups to Glacier for long-term storage.
Create daily snapshots manually and use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to retain them for 2 years.
Use AWS Lambda to trigger daily exports of the database to Amazon S3 and apply a bucket policy to retain objects for 2 years.
Explanation
Answer A is correct because AWS Backup provides a managed solution to create automated daily backups of RDS instances with configurable retention rules (up to 100 years). This ensures backups are retained for exactly 2 years and can be restored on demand.
Other options are incorrect because:
- B: RDS automated backups have a maximum retention period of 35 days; S3 lifecycle policies cannot extend this limit.
- C: Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) only manages EBS snapshots, not RDS snapshots.
- D: Manual exports via Lambda are error-prone and less efficient than native backup solutions. S3 bucket policies enforce retention but lack native RDS restore capabilities.
Key Points:
1. AWS Backup supports long-term retention rules for RDS.
2. RDS automated backups cannot exceed 35 days.
3. Use AWS services designed for RDS backups to ensure reliability and compliance.
Answer
The correct answer is: A