A legal team stores contract drafts in a Cloud Storage bucket. From now on, the team wants every overwrite or deletion to leave the earlier content recoverable, without depending on a separate backup job. Which bucket feature should be enabled?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: A
Object Versioning keeps a noncurrent version of an object whenever it is overwritten or deleted. Administrators can list those versions, restore one by copying it back, or delete specific versions permanently. Because the protection lives in the bucket itself, it does not depend on a separate backup process. Lifecycle rules can clean up old versions but do not preserve them, retention policies block deletion for a period, and uniform access controls only change how permissions are managed.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Lifecycle rules can delete noncurrent versions after a set age, which is a cleanup tool. Configured this way they would remove the very history the team needs to recover from.
- C. Bucket Lock makes a retention policy immutable so objects cannot be deleted before the period ends. It blocks early deletion but does not keep earlier content when a file is overwritten.
- D. Uniform bucket-level access turns off object-level ACLs so permissions are managed through IAM. It changes how access is granted and does nothing to keep prior versions of data.