An enterprise runs mission-critical stateful workloads on Compute Engine virtual machines in the us-central1 region using zonal Persistent Disks. The architecture team needs to establish a backup and disaster recovery strategy that satisfies several operational and compliance requirements: Automated, regular point-in-time backups to maintain a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 4 hours for operational recovery Protection against a catastrophic regional outage, ensuring backups can be restored directly into the us-east1 region Retention of monthly compliance backups for up to 3 years while minimizing ongoing storage costs Which solution should you recommend to meet these requirements?

Configure automated snapshot schedules on the Persistent Disks that create standard snapshots stored in a multi-region location (`us`) for daily operational recovery, and configure scheduled archive snapshots stored in multi-region `us` for long-term monthly compliance retention.: ### What Persistent Disk Snapshot Management Is **Compute Engine Persistent Disk snapshots** are incremental point-in-time backups that capture block-level changes from persistent storage. Snapshots can be configured as either **standard snapshots** for short-term operational recovery or **archive snapshots** for low-cost, long-term data retention. They can be placed into **regional** or **multi-regional** Cloud Storage locations. ### How It Meets The Requirements - **Automated Regular Backups (RPO of 4 hours)**: Attaching a **snapshot schedule** to the Persistent Disks automates snapshot creation at regular intervals without manual intervention. - **Disaster Recovery Resiliency**: Specifying a **multi-regional storage location** (such as `us`) ensures that snapshots are automatically replicated across multiple regions, allowing immediate disk restoration in `us-east1` during a regional outage in `us-central1`. - **Cost-Effective Long-Term Retention**: Utilizing **archive snapshots** for monthly compliance points provides lower-cost geo-redundant storage optimized for data retained for months or years, while standard snapshots handle operational recovery. ### Key Advantages - **Incremental Storage**: Snapshots only store newly modified blocks after the initial baseline, saving substantial storage capacity. - **Multi-Region Durability**: Multi-region placement provides cross-region redundancy without requiring manual data transfers or custom replication scripts. - **Lifecycle Cost Optimization**: Separating short-term retention (standard) from long-term compliance (archive) optimizes total cost of ownership (TCO). ### Why This Is Optimal This architecture leverages fully managed native Compute Engine capabilities (snapshot schedules, multi-region snapshot storage, and archive snapshot tiers) to satisfy RPO, cross-region disaster recovery, and long-term cost optimization with minimal operational overhead.

StudyCerts

Persistent Disk Snapshot Strategy Cross Region Durability | Intrigued by the art of cloud architecture? Discover how to design, develop, and manage robust, secure, scalable, and dynamic solutions on Google Cloud as you prepare for the Professional Cloud Architect exam! | StudyCerts

Professional Cloud Architect

Intrigued by the art of cloud architecture? Discover how to design, develop, and manage robust, secure, scalable, and dynamic solutions on Google Cloud as you prepare for the Professional Cloud Architect exam!

Intermediate

Prepare and test your skills

Track Readiness

Set Exam Goal

Intermediate

Prepare and test your skills

Track Readiness

Set Exam Goal

Persistent Disk Snapshot Strategy Cross Region Durability

Section: Backup and recovery

Worked example. The correct answer is already marked and every option is explained below, so there is nothing to select here. To answer questions yourself, start the free trial.

An enterprise runs mission-critical stateful workloads on Compute Engine virtual machines in the us-central1 region using zonal Persistent Disks. The architecture team needs to establish a backup and disaster recovery strategy that satisfies several operational and compliance requirements:

Automated, regular point-in-time backups to maintain a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 4 hours for operational recovery
Protection against a catastrophic regional outage, ensuring backups can be restored directly into the us-east1 region
Retention of monthly compliance backups for up to 3 years while minimizing ongoing storage costs

Which solution should you recommend to meet these requirements?

Take scheduled instant snapshots of the Persistent Disks in us-central1 and set a Cloud Storage object lifecycle rule to transition instant snapshots to Archive storage after 90 days.

Configure automated snapshot schedules on the Persistent Disks that create standard snapshots stored in a multi-region location (us) for daily operational recovery, and configure scheduled archive snapshots stored in multi-region us for long-term monthly compliance retention.

Configure Persistent Disk Asynchronous Replication (PD Async Replication) between us-central1 and us-east1 for both operational recovery and 3-year compliance data retention.

Create regionally scoped snapshot schedules restricted strictly to us-central1 to avoid cross-region network egress costs, and export snapshots older than 30 days to a single-region Coldline Cloud Storage bucket in us-central1.

Professional Cloud Architect

Persistent Disk Snapshot Strategy Cross Region Durability

Related questions