Recovery point objective (RPO)

The most data, measured in time, the business can afford to lose.

An RPO of two hours means backups or replication must make it possible to restore data to no more than two hours before the outage. It drives backup frequency and replication choices. The business, not IT, sets it.

On the exam

If the question is about acceptable data loss, the answer is RPO. A very low RPO points to continuous replication or mirroring.

Related terms

Recovery time objective (RTO)How quickly a system must be running again after a disruption.
Business impact analysis (BIA)Working out which processes matter most and how fast they must recover.
Full, incremental and differential backupsThree ways to back up, with different restore effort.

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