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RPO And RTO Are Business Decisions

Grant Fritchey notes that backup frequency is a business decision, not just a technical decision:

RPO is a TLA for Recovery Point Objective. The easiest way to describe RPO is to ask, “In terms of time, how much data are we willing to lose?” The immediate answer is always going to be zero. Here is where we have to be honest. You won’t be able to guarantee zero data loss (yeah, there are probably ways to do this, but #entrylevel). Talk with the business. Most of the time, you’ll find that they’d actually be OK with 15 minutes, or maybe 5 minutes, or even an hour of lost data. It really varies, not only from business to business, but from database to database within the business (allow for this flexibility). You need to establish this number. RPO is going to help you figure out how to set up your backups, your recovery model, your logs and their backups. All that stuff that seemed so technical, it’s all based on this extremely important number that you’re going to work with the business to arrive at.

It’s good to have this talk with decision-makers, particularly when presented in menu form with a discussion of costs (price of disk space, particularly) and time.