Glossary / Compliance & operations

RPO & RTO (recovery objectives)

RPO and RTO are the two numbers that define disaster recovery: RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time since the last backup; RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is how long you can afford to be down. Together they dictate the architecture — hourly snapshots or continuous replication, restore-from-backup or hot standby. Decide them by business cost, then engineer to them.