Glossary · Recovery Point Objective
RPO
The maximum amount of data loss, measured in time, that a business can tolerate for a given workload after an incident.
RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is the answer to “how much data can we afford to lose?” — expressed as a time interval. An RPO of one hour means backups must run at least hourly; anything older than an hour at the point of incident is acceptable loss.
RPO is paired with RTO — the two together define what “recovery” actually means for each workload.
How RPO is set
RPO is a business decision, not a technical one. It’s driven by how much manual re-entry, reconciliation, or revenue loss the organisation can absorb if the data between the last backup and the incident is gone for good.
Typical ranges:
- Transactional databases, order systems, financial ledgers — RPO often under 15 minutes. Continuous replication or transaction-log shipping.
- File servers, document stores — RPO often hourly to a few hours. Hourly snapshots with daily off-site copies.
- Email — minutes to an hour, depending on platform and retention strategy.
- Archive data, long-tail records — RPO of 24 hours is often acceptable.
How Symsafe handles RPO
Per-workload RPOs are documented as part of every backup and disaster recovery engagement. The number is agreed with the business, the backup schedule is configured to meet it, and monitoring confirms the schedule is actually running. An RPO nobody has agreed to is just a default setting.