What are RTO and RPO?
The recovery point objective (RPO) and the recovery time objective (RTO) are two very specific parameters that are closely associated with recovery. The RTO is how long you can go without a specific application. This is often associated with your maximum allowable or maximum tolerable outage. The RPO is slightly different. This dictates the allowable data loss: How much data can you afford to lose? For example, if you do a nightly backup at 8:00 p.m. and your system crashes at 4:00 p.m. the following day, everything that was changed since your previous night’s backup was lost. Your RPO in this particular scenario is the previous day’s backup.
