Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert AZ-305 Practice Question

Enabling blob versioning creates a new, immutable version whenever a blob is overwritten or deleted, so every state of every file can be kept for as long as required. Azure Storage lifecycle management can target previous versions and move those older than 90 days to the Archive tier, providing the lowest per-gigabyte cost while still honoring seven-year retention. Configuring the account for read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) ensures each version is asynchronously copied to the paired region and remains readable there at all times, fulfilling the disaster-recovery requirement without the need for a failover. Soft delete alone cannot hold data for more than 365 days, so it fails the seven-year requirement. AzCopy-based snapshot scripts rely on custom code, lack automatic long-term retention management, and do not guarantee cross-region consistency. Protecting the account only with Azure Backup in an LRS vault would not provide an immediately readable secondary-region copy and would incur higher storage costs than lifecycle-based archival. Therefore, enabling blob versioning combined with lifecycle management to Archive and RA-GRS replication is the best fit.