RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, defining how far back in time you must be able to restore after an incident.
Why it matters
RPO drives how often you back up or replicate. If the RPO is 15 minutes, you need copies at least every 15 minutes; a nightly backup would lose up to a day of data.
A lower RPO costs more because it needs more frequent copies or continuous replication. Each system can have its own value: a blog may tolerate a day, while a payments database may tolerate seconds.
Example
An e-commerce site sets an RPO of 5 minutes for orders. It uses continuous database replication to a second region. If the primary fails at 14:03, the replica holds everything up to roughly 14:00 or later.
Common mistakes
- Setting an RPO but running backups less often than that.
- Confusing RPO with RTO, which is about downtime rather than data loss.
- Applying one RPO to every system instead of ranking them by importance.
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