A municipality’s AWS Backup plan retains Amazon EBS snapshots forever, and storage costs grow every month even though policy only requires 35 days of operational recovery points. What change best addresses the cost of retention?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Forever snapshots are a forever bill. If policy says 35 days, set retention to 35 days and stop paying for ancient recovery points nobody will use. More forever copies, zero backups, or stuffing snapshots into metric streams don’t solve retention cost sanely.
Full Explanation
Backup storage cost scales with retention length and copy sprawl. Aligning AWS Backup retention with documented requirements (for example 35 days for operational recovery) avoids unbounded snapshot growth. Adding unreviewed forever copies increases cost; eliminating backups removes recoverability; CloudWatch metric streams are not a snapshot store. Right-sizing retention is the cost-optimized storage practice.