A communication company has deployed several EC2 instances in region ap-southeast-1 which are used to monitor user activities. The AWS administrator has configured an EBS lifecycle policy to create a snapshot every day for each EBS volume to preserve data. The retention is configured as 5, which means the oldest snapshot will be deleted after 5 days. The administrator plans to copy some snapshots manually to another region ap-southeast-2 as these snapshots contain some important data. Can these snapshots be retained? 

Answer options:

A.These new snapshots may be deleted after the retention period, as they are still affected by the retention policy.
B.These new snapshots can be kept only when they are copied to another region. Otherwise, they may be deleted by the retention policy. In this case, the snapshots can be kept.
C.These new snapshots can be kept as the retention schedule is not carried over to the copy.
D.The new snapshots in region ap-southeast-2 will be deleted after 5 days unless the delete protection option is enabled.

Correct Answer – C
Copying a snapshot to a new Region is commonly used for geographic expansion, migration, disaster recovery, etc.
EBS snapshots` lifecycle policies contain some rules. One of the rules is that when you copy a policy`s snapshot, the new copy is not influenced by the retention schedule.
Option A is incorrect: Because the new snapshots will be kept.
Option B is incorrect: Because no matter the new snapshots are in the same region or not, they can be retained.
Option C is CORRECT: Because the new snapshots are not affected by the original policy. Reference is in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/snapshot-lifecycle.html.
Option D is incorrect: Because there is no delete protection option for snapshots.