SY0-701 Question 181
Single answerEase of recoveryA company is redesigning its backup strategy after a ransomware incident. During the last recovery effort, the team discovered that restoring an entire server from weekly full backups and daily incremental backups took too long because each incremental set had to be applied in sequence. The security manager wants to improve ease of recovery for critical systems while still keeping backup operations reasonably efficient. Which backup approach BEST meets this requirement?
- A
Continue using full backups every week with daily incremental backups
- B
Use daily differential backups with periodic full backups
- C
Replace backups with RAID 5 to speed up recovery
- D
Use snapshots only and eliminate all full backups
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
Explanation
The best answer is to use daily differential backups with periodic full backups because the scenario specifically emphasizes ease of recovery. In backup planning, there is often a tradeoff between backup speed/storage efficiency and recovery simplicity. Incremental backups are efficient to create and store, but they increase restoration complexity because multiple backup sets must be chained together. Differential backups grow larger over time, but they simplify recovery by requiring only the last full backup and the latest differential backup. This aligns with common disaster recovery and business continuity best practices, where recovery time objectives (RTOs) strongly influence backup design. Security+ commonly tests the distinction between full, incremental, and differential backups, especially in terms of recovery time and operational impact. Guidance from industry best practices, including disaster recovery planning principles reflected in NIST contingency planning publications, supports choosing backup methods based on restoration requirements, not just backup efficiency.
- A. Incorrect.
This approach is less effective for ease of recovery because restoring from incremental backups typically requires the last full backup plus every incremental backup created since that full backup. That makes recovery slower and more operationally complex, especially after several days have passed.
- B. Correct.
This is correct. Differential backups require the last full backup and only the most recent differential backup for restoration. That generally makes recovery faster and simpler than using incrementals, which aligns with the goal of improving ease of recovery while still avoiding the overhead of performing full backups every day.
- C. Incorrect.
RAID 5 improves availability and fault tolerance for disk failures, but it is not a backup solution and does not protect against ransomware, data corruption, or accidental deletion in the same way backups do. Choosing RAID as a replacement reflects a common misconception that redundancy and backup are interchangeable.
- D. Incorrect.
Snapshots can be useful for rapid rollback in some environments, but relying on snapshots alone is not a complete backup strategy. Snapshots may reside on the same system or storage platform and can be affected by ransomware, corruption, or platform failure. Eliminating full backups would weaken recovery resilience rather than improve it.