jargon

Platform & DevOps·Running it: capacity, failure and recovery

backups run nightly, so recovering means losing up to a day of writes, and nobody outside the platform team knew that.

Recovery point objective

Also calledRPO, acceptable data loss

The maximum acceptable data loss, expressed as time: how far back you may be forced to rewind. It is set by replication and backup frequency, so nightly snapshots mean a day and synchronous replication means approximately none. It is the number people conflate with recovery time, and the two are independent — you can be back in ten minutes having lost a day, or take a day to restore losing nothing.

Commonly confused with