---
title: "Recovery Point Objective (RPO) — monitoring glossary"
description: "Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of data loss (measured in time) a business can tolerate after a disaster. An RPO of 15 minutes means…"
canonical: "https://lemwatch.com/glossary/rpo"
source: "https://lemwatch.com"
---

# Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

> Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of data loss (measured in time) a business can tolerate after a disaster. An RPO of 15 minutes means backups or replication must run at least every 15 minutes; an RPO of zero requires synchronous…

**Also known as:** Recovery Point Target

## Definition

 RPO drives backup frequency and replication strategy. A payments database with an RPO of zero needs synchronous multi-region replication. A marketing analytics warehouse with an RPO of 24 hours can rely on nightly snapshots.

 RPO and RTO are set together but answer different questions: RPO is 'how much data can we lose?', RTO is 'how long can we be down?'. Both belong in the service catalogue alongside the SLA.

## Why it matters

 RPO decides your backup bill. Sub-minute RPOs cost 10-100x more than daily-snapshot RPOs. Pinning down RPO per service prevents both under-investment (losing a day of orders) and over-investment (paying enterprise replication fees for a static marketing page).


## Related

- [Monitoring glossary](https://lemwatch.com/glossary)
- [Recovery Time Objective](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/rto)
- [SLA](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/sla)
- [Incident](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/incident)
- [Mean Time Between Failures](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/mtbf)
- [Service Level Objective](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/slo)
- [All monitoring checks](https://lemwatch.com/features)
- [robots.txt](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/robots-txt)