Recovery point objective RPO determines how much data you can lose during an outage. Most companies have fantasy RPOs that don't match their backup frequency. We explain what's real.
Let's get real about data loss. Your recovery point objective RPO is supposed to tell you how much data you're willing to lose when disaster strikes. But here's the thing - most organizations are living in a fantasy world. They claim they can only afford to lose an hour of data, but they're backing up once a day. That's 24 hours of potential data loss, not one hour. The math doesn't add up.
In this episode, I walk through what recovery point objective RPO actually means, why it's measured in time instead of gigabytes or terabytes, and how different disaster scenarios - especially ransomware - can force you to accept way more data loss than you originally planned. You might think you're recovering from yesterday's backup, but what if that backup is already corrupted? Now you're going back two weeks, and your RPO just went out the window.
We cover the practical stuff too. How do you test your RPO? Can you even test it? The answer is yes, but it's different from testing your recovery time objective. You're really testing backup compliance - did the backup run when it was supposed to? Did it complete successfully? If a backup fails more than once, that should be all hands on deck because now you're talking about 48 or 72 hours of data loss.
I share strategies for rightsizing your backup frequency, using database transaction logs to minimize data loss between full backups, and why four backups throughout the day often takes the same amount of time as one backup once a day with incremental systems. We also get into modern backup technologies like continuous data protection (CDP) and near-CDP, snapshot-based backups, and why most of these are storage-based solutions.
And here's something people forget - your SaaS applications. Microsoft 365, Salesforce, all those apps where you're generating data throughout the day. Are you backing those up with the same rigor as your on-premises systems? Are you meeting your RPO targets there? Microsoft finally admitted you need backup by offering their own service (at extra cost), but I'd still use a third party for that.
The bottom line: start with an honest assessment of where you are right now. Don't lie to yourself about your current RPO. Then rightsize your backup frequency, validate your backups are working, and consider whether you need to change your backup technology to actually meet your stated objectives.
Subscribe for more backup and recovery reality checks. No fantasy here, just the truth about protecting your data.
While you're here, Here's some other great episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZGn5xlYTec
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHz5hGZy0nY&t=2s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov834MWoBXg&t=2s
This YouTube channel is also available as an audio podcast!
https://www.backupwrapup.com
We also have a blog that I've been running for over 20 years!
https://www.backupcentral.com
I've also written four O'Reilly books! My latest:
https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Data-Protection-Recoverability-Workloads-ebook/dp/B093TQTBC3
