Operations

RPO / RTO

Recovery Point / Recovery Time Objective.

In plain terms

RPO = how much data you can lose (e.g. 5 min). RTO = how long the recovery takes (e.g. 1 hour). Drives backup frequency and replication topology.

Origin

Disaster-recovery terminology from the mainframe era (1980s). Still the standard vocabulary in every enterprise BCP/DR document.

Where it shows up in production

Backup tier targets RPO 1 hour = hourly snapshots / continuous archival. RPO seconds = synchronous replication.
Cross-region failover RTO depends on warm vs cold standby; warm = minutes, cold = hours.

Sources & further reading

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