RPO
Recovery Point Objective
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
RPO is how much data you can afford to lose in a disaster, measured in time. If your RPO is 1 hour, your backups need to run at least every hour. An RPO of zero means you need real-time replication — every transaction must be copied somewhere else immediately. It's the answer to 'how many hours of data are you okay losing?'
Real Talk
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. It determines backup and replication frequency — an RPO of 1 hour requires hourly backups or continuous replication with up to 1 hour of lag. RPO of zero requires synchronous replication, which impacts performance and cost.
When You'll Hear This
"With an RPO of zero, we need synchronous database replication." / "Our RPO is 15 minutes — we run incremental backups every 15 min to S3."
Related Terms
Backup
A database backup is a saved copy of your data at a specific point in time.
Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery (DR) is your plan for when everything goes absolutely wrong — data center floods, region-wide outage, ransomware attack.
Replication
Replication means automatically copying your database to one or more other servers in real time. If the main server dies, a replica takes over.
RTO (Recovery Time Objective)
RTO is how long you can afford to be down after a disaster. If your RTO is 4 hours, you need to be back online within 4 hours of failure.