RPO (recovery point objective)
Also called recovery point objective.
The point in time to which data must be recoverable after an outage: in practice, how much recent data you can afford to lose.
Last updated
What it is.
NIST defines RPO as the point in time to which data must be recovered after an outage. If your RPO is one hour, then after a failure you must be able to restore data from no more than an hour before it happened.
RPO is set by the business and met by the backup design. An RPO of 24 hours can be met with nightly backups. An RPO of minutes needs continuous replication or point-in-time recovery. It is paired with RTO, which is about time to recover, not data lost.
Why it matters
Backups that are too far apart mean lost orders, payments or records after a failure. Backups that are more frequent than needed cost money. Setting an RPO per system makes that trade-off a decision instead of an accident.
In a product build
RPO is decided when the database and hosting are chosen. Writing it down during the build also tells the team which backups to test before launch.
Common mistakes.
- 01
Never testing a restore, so the RPO is a hope rather than a fact.
- 02
One RPO for every system, when some data matters far more than other data.
- 03
Forgetting files, queues and third-party data that are not in the main database.
Read the official text.
Primary sources this definition is based on.
- NIST CSRC glossary: recovery point objectivechecked 2026-10-25
Related terms.
- RTO (recovery time objective)How long a system can stay down after a failure before the outage seriously harms the business.
- UptimeThe share of time a service is working and reachable, usually written as a percentage such as 99.9%.
- SLA (service level agreement)A contract that promises a level of service, such as uptime or support response time, and says what happens if it is missed.
- SLO (service level objective)An internal reliability target for a service, such as 99.9% of requests succeeding, measured by a service level indicator (SLI).
Guides and pages
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