Practice Test Geeks(CSA) Certified System Administrator Practice Test
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Backup and Disaster Recovery Flashcards

7 cards from real CSA practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.

Read the first 7 Backup and Disaster Recovery flashcards as text

  1. Which cloud storage class is most cost-effective for backup data that is rarely accessed but must be retrievable within minutes?

    Answer: Glacier Instant Retrieval (or equivalent infrequent-access tier)

    Infrequent-access tiers with instant retrieval offer low storage costs while still providing milliseconds-to-minutes access times.

  2. An administrator discovers that backup jobs have been completing successfully for months, but restores from those backups consistently fail. What is the most likely root cause?

    Answer: Backup verification or integrity testing was never performed

    Backups should be regularly tested via restore drills; a backup that was never verified may be silently corrupted or incomplete.

  3. What does 'deduplication' accomplish in a backup system?

    Answer: Eliminates redundant data blocks so identical data is stored only once

    Deduplication identifies and stores only unique data blocks, significantly reducing backup storage requirements.

  4. Which disaster recovery metric defines the maximum age of data that can be lost during a recovery event?

    Answer: RPO

    RPO (Recovery Point Objective) specifies how far back in time recovery data can go, i.e., the maximum tolerable data loss window.

  5. A system administrator implements replication where data is written to the secondary site before the primary site confirms the write to the application. What type of replication is this?

    Answer: Synchronous replication

    Synchronous replication requires the secondary site to acknowledge the write before the primary confirms it, ensuring zero data loss but adding latency.

  6. What is the '3-2-1 backup rule'?

    Answer: Keep 3 copies of data, on 2 different media types, with 1 copy offsite

    The 3-2-1 rule is an industry best practice: 3 total copies, stored on 2 different media, with at least 1 copy kept offsite.

  7. Which backup method is most appropriate for capturing the state of a running virtual machine without shutting it down?

    Answer: Snapshot-based backup

    VM snapshots capture the in-memory state and disk at a point in time, allowing live VMs to be backed up without downtime.