When the retention period ends for an object, then

• A. The historical data is moved into Snowflake Fail-safe
• B. Historical data is no longer available for querying
• C. Past objects can no longer be cloned
• D. Past objects that were dropped can no longer be restored

Answer: (A)

When you set a retention period for data, you can query historical versions only during that window. Once that window ends, Snowflake keeps the historical data for disaster recovery in a separate guard period called Fail-Safe. During Fail-Safe you don’t have access to query or directly work with those past versions, but Snowflake can still restore the data if needed within that Fail-Safe window. This is why the best answer is that the historical data moves into Snowflake Fail-Safe after the retention period ends. The other statements aren’t accurate because they imply there’s no recovery path or ongoing accessibility, whereas Fail-Safe exists precisely to provide a last-resort recovery option managed by Snowflake.