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Glossary

RPO (Recovery Point Objective)

How much data you can afford to lose, measured in time — e.g. "no more than 1 hour of data."

RPO answers: if disaster strikes right now, how far back does your last usable backup go? An RPO of 1 hour means backups run at least hourly, so at most you lose an hour's work. A shorter RPO costs more (more frequent backups, more storage), so it should be set deliberately per system based on how painful losing that data actually is — not left as a default nobody chose.

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