Question

Difficulty: MediumBusiness Continuity and Disaster Recovery

A network administrator is designing a backup strategy for a critical syslog telemetry database. The operational goal is to shorten the nightly backup execution window while ensuring that restoring the system after a catastrophic failure requires applying the weekly full backup and at most one subsequent backup file. Which backup strategy should the administrator implement to meet these requirements?

  1. Perform a weekly full backup on Sunday and daily differential backups on weeknights.Answer
  2. B
    Perform a weekly full backup on Sunday and daily incremental backups on weeknights.
  3. C
    Perform daily full backups every weeknight.
  4. D
    Perform daily synthetic differential backups without an initial full backup baseline.

Answer

Performing a weekly full backup combined with daily differential backups shortens the daily backup window compared to full backups and ensures a recovery process requiring only the full baseline and the latest differential file.
Differential backups capture all changes made since the last full backup baseline. Because the archive bit is not cleared, each differential file contains cumulative changes. Restoring system data requires only two items: the baseline full backup and the latest differential backup file. This minimizes nightly backup windows compared to daily full backups while keeping recovery overhead minimal.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the requirement for daily backup window duration.
Full daily backups are eliminated because they take the longest time to execute every night.
The scenario specifically requests minimizing the nightly backup execution window.
2
Analyze the recovery constraint requiring at most one additional backup file after the baseline.
Incremental backups are eliminated because restoring requires the full baseline plus all sequential incremental files created up to the failure point.
Incremental backups record changes since the last incremental backup, accumulating multiple files across the week.
3
Evaluate the differential backup model against both constraints.
Differential backups copy all changes since the last full backup without resetting the archive bit. Thus, restore operations only require the initial full backup baseline and the single most recent differential backup file.
Differential backups satisfy both the reduced backup window requirement and the single-file restore addition rule.

Key Concept

Differential vs Incremental Backup Restoration Characteristics
Rate this question