Which metric describes the maximum tolerable data loss in terms of time during a disaster?

• A. Recovery Time Objective
• B. Recovery Point Objective
• C. Mean Time To Repair
• D. Uptime

Answer: (B)

Recovery Point Objective is the metric that describes how much data you can afford to lose, expressed as a time interval. It sets the maximum age of data that can be recovered after a disaster, which directly guides how often you must back up or replicate data. For example, an RPO of 15 minutes means you should have backups or a replication system that can restore data up to 15 minutes before the outage; any data created in the last 15 minutes could be lost. This differs from Recovery Time Objective, which concerns how long operations take to resume after a disruption (downtime), not how much data might be lost. Mean Time To Repair relates to the time required to fix failed components, and Uptime measures overall system availability.