RPO (recovery point objective)

Your recovery point objective answers the question: “If we have to restore from backup, how far back in time is acceptable?” If your backups run once a night, your RPO is effectively up to 24 hours — anything entered since last night’s backup could be gone. If you back up every hour, you’d lose at most an hour of work.

For a small practice or office, RPO is easy to make concrete. Picture losing every appointment booked, every chart note written and every invoice created since the last backup. For a medical office seeing 40 patients a day, losing a full day of clinical notes means re-creating records from memory and paper — a patient-safety issue, not just an inconvenience.

A shorter RPO means more frequent backups, and sometimes different technology. Cloud services like Microsoft 365 save changes continuously, so the main concern there is deletion or ransomware rather than lost edits; a local server running your practice database may need snapshots every 15 to 60 minutes. The backup storage calculator shows how frequency and retention affect the space you need.

Example: an accounting firm decides it can lose no more than one hour of work during tax season. Its file server takes hourly snapshots, copies them to the cloud overnight, and keeps an immutable copy that ransomware can’t alter. RPO works alongside RTO: RPO is how much data you lose, RTO is how long you’re down.