Question

A media company runs a content management application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across three Availability Zones. Shared user-uploaded assets are stored on an Amazon EFS file system mounted by all instances. Compliance requires that any accidental deletion or corruption of files can be recovered to a point no more than 1 hour old, and the recovery process must be fully automated and centrally auditable across the company's accounts. Which approach best meets these requirements with the least operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Enable AWS Backup with a backup plan targeting the EFS file system, set the backup frequency to hourly with continuous backups (point-in-time recovery) enabled, and use a Backup vault with cross-account management via AWS Organizations.

Answer

Write a cron job on one EC2 instance that uses rsync to copy the EFS contents to an S3 bucket every hour, and restore files manually from S3 when needed.

Answer

Enable EFS lifecycle management to transition files to Infrequent Access storage, and rely on the durability of EFS across AZs to protect against deletion.

Answer

Create an hourly EFS-to-EFS replication configuration to a second file system in another Region and fail over to it whenever files are deleted.