Glossary: System Design Beyond the Basics

RPO / RTO

Also written: RPO, RTO, recovery point objective, recovery time objective

RPO (recovery point objective) is how much recent data you may lose in a disaster, measured in time. RTO (recovery time objective) is how long recovery may take; for example, replication lagging up to 2 seconds gives an RPO of about 2 seconds, and 3 minutes to detect an outage plus 10 to switch regions gives an RTO of about 13 minutes.