RPO

Recovery Point Objective

Max acceptable amount of data loss measured in time.

When you'd see it: Disaster recovery and backup design. RPO sets how often you must back up.

Why it matters: RPO is the most data, measured in time, you can afford to lose in an outage. An RPO of one hour means backing up at least hourly. It directly drives backup frequency and cost.

Common mistakes: Confusing RPO (how much data you can lose) with RTO (how fast you recover). They answer different questions and are set separately.