Backup and Recovery Term — RPO and RTO

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) are two of the most important parameters of the disaster recovery (DR) or data protection planning.

These are the objectives/decision points for choosing the optimal backup software.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) describes up to what point in time could the business-critical data can be recovered in other words the last point where the data is in a usable format

If you back up all or most of your data in regularly scheduled 24-hour increments, then in the worst-case scenario you will lose 24 hours’ worth of data. For some applications this is acceptable. For others, it is absolutely not.

For example, if you have a 1-hour RPO for a business-critical application then you will have a maximum 1-hour gap between backup and data loss. Having a 1-hour RPO does not necessarily mean you will lose 1 hour worth of data, you will lose the maximum of last one hour worth data.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

RTO refers to how much time an application can be down without causing significant damage to the business. Some applications can be down for days without significant consequences. Some high priority applications can only be down for a few seconds, RTO is the duration which your IT team takes to recover to the last good backup.

Arrange for more frequent backup that will let you hit your application-specific RPO.

Originally published at asvignesh.