CSA Backup and Disaster Recovery 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which backup strategy copies only files that have changed since the last FULL backup, regardless of whether a previous incremental backup was taken?
- Incremental backup
- Differential backup (Correct answer)
- Synthetic full backup
- Mirror backup
Correct answer: Differential backup
A differential backup copies all data changed since the last full backup, making it independent of other differential backups.
Question 2: What is the primary purpose of a hot site in disaster recovery planning?
- To store archived tape backups offsite
- To provide a fully operational duplicate environment with minimal failover time (Correct answer)
- To serve as a data staging area during normal operations
- To reduce the cost of primary datacenter hardware
Correct answer: To provide a fully operational duplicate environment with minimal failover time
A hot site is a fully equipped, always-on duplicate facility that allows near-immediate failover during a disaster.
Question 3: An administrator needs to restore a single deleted file from three weeks ago. The organization uses weekly full and daily incremental backups. What is the minimum number of backup sets needed?
- 1 (the last full backup)
- 2 (the last full plus one incremental)
- Up to 3 (the full plus each incremental up to the deletion date) (Correct answer)
- Up to 8 (the full plus all incrementals for three weeks)
Correct answer: Up to 3 (the full plus each incremental up to the deletion date)
With incrementals, you need the last full backup plus every incremental from that point up to the day before deletion.
Question 4: What does the term 'journaling' refer to in the context of database backup and recovery?
- Writing backup logs to a remote syslog server
- Recording all transactions so the database can be replayed to a consistent state (Correct answer)
- Encrypting backup files before offsite transfer
- Scheduling automatic backup jobs via cron
Correct answer: Recording all transactions so the database can be replayed to a consistent state
Database journaling records every transaction, enabling point-in-time recovery by replaying or rolling back those transactions.
Question 5: Which RAID level provides disk striping with parity distributed across all drives, offering both performance and fault tolerance?
- RAID 0
- RAID 1
- RAID 5 (Correct answer)
- RAID 10
Correct answer: RAID 5
RAID 5 stripes data and distributes parity across all member drives, tolerating a single drive failure.
Question 6: A company's DR plan states that systems must be fully operational within 4 hours of a declared disaster. Which metric does this define?
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) (Correct answer)
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
- Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Correct answer: Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
RTO defines the maximum acceptable time to restore systems and resume normal operations after a disaster.
Question 7: What is a 'bare-metal restore'?
- Restoring only user data files to an existing OS installation
- Recovering a complete system including OS, applications, and data to new or wiped hardware (Correct answer)
- Migrating a virtual machine to a physical server
- Restoring firmware to a network switch
Correct answer: Recovering a complete system including OS, applications, and data to new or wiped hardware
Bare-metal restore rebuilds an entire system from scratch onto hardware that has no existing OS or data.
CSA Backup and Disaster Recovery 2
Which backup strategy copies only files that have changed since the last FULL backup, regardless of whether a previous incremental backup was taken?