When planning backups and recovery, two numbers matter most.

RPO: Recovery Point Objective

How much data can you afford to lose?

It is measured in time, going backward from the moment of failure. If your last good backup was 12 hours old when disaster struck, you lost up to 12 hours of work.

– RPO of 24 hours: daily backups are enough

– RPO of 1 hour: you need hourly backups or replication

– RPO of near zero: continuous replication

RTO: Recovery Time Objective

How long can you be down?

It is the time from the outage until the system is working again.

– RTO of days: restoring from backup may be acceptable

– RTO of hours: faster restore methods or standby systems

– RTO of minutes: high availability and failover

A simple example

An order system fails at 3:00 p.m. The last backup ran at 1:00 a.m. The system is restored by 9:00 p.m.

– Data lost: about 14 hours of orders (actual RPO)

– Downtime: 6 hours (actual RTO)

Why this matters

Shorter targets cost more. Replication, standby systems, and fast storage are more expensive than nightly backups. Setting targets lets you spend money where it matters.

How to set them

1. Talk to department heads about the impact of downtime and data loss

2. Estimate the cost per hour of downtime

3. Set different targets for different systems. Email, accounting, and file shares rarely need the same level.

4. Choose technology that meets each target

5. Test that you can actually meet them

Common mistakes

– One target for everything

– Never testing real restore times

– Forgetting dependencies, such as authentication servers, networks, and licenses

– Ignoring how long it takes to download large cloud backups

DBR Soft can help define realistic targets and design solutions to meet them. Contact us for more information.