Back up a single Compute Engine VM disk daily, retain backups for 7 days, minimal setup and compliant with security. What should you do?

Creating daily scheduled persistent disk snapshots with a 7-day retention is the most straightforward and compliant solution. Snapshots are incremental, cost-effective, and directly integrated with Compute Engine, requiring minimal setup. They capture the disk's state at a point in time, allowing for easy restoration. Persistent disk asynchronous replication is for disaster recovery across regions, not daily backups with retention. Using Cloud Scheduler and Cloud Functions to create machine images is overly complex for a single disk backup and machine images are typically for VM templates, not point-in-time disk backups. Copying disk files to Cloud Storage via gsutil from a cron job would require the VM to be stopped or the disk to be unmounted for a consistent backup, and it's a manual, less integrated approach compared to snapshots.