Question

Your team runs a production application on a single Compute Engine VM with a 500 GB persistent disk. Management requires automated daily backups of the disk with 14-day retention, minimal ongoing operational effort, and the ability to restore quickly if the disk is corrupted. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Create a resource policy that defines a snapshot schedule with a 14-day retention period and attach it to the persistent disk.

Answer

Write a cron job on the VM that runs 'gcloud compute disks snapshot' each night and manually delete snapshots older than 14 days.

Answer

Create a custom image from the disk each day using Cloud Scheduler and store the images in a Cloud Storage bucket with a lifecycle rule.

Answer

Enable regional persistent disk replication so the disk is automatically copied to a second zone for backup.