Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective

Are you familiar with recovery time objective and recovery point objectives? These are really important factors when you’re planning your SQL Server backup strategy.

First, we’ll take a look at the recovery point objective.

Recovery Point is really looking at when the system fails what is the worst case for a point in time that you can restore up to. The recovery point objective is your goal for what a reasonable recovery point would be.

So let’s say your system failed at 4pm. If you had really great backups, you might be able to restore up to like 3:59 and 59 seconds.

But if you didn’t have such good backups, you might be stuck restoring to 11pm the night before, and you lose everything for today. Would that be acceptable to your business?

Next, we have the recovery time objective.

What the recovery time is, is how long it’s going to take to get your system restored and running again? Recovery time objective is your goal of how long you would want it to take.

You might have really up to date backups. But if it’s going to take you 12 hours to do the restore, well, you’re down for 12 hours just waiting for those files to be restored.

Now, there’s a lot of factors that can go into the recovery time. To help with your recovery time,

• There’s things that we can do with training.
• There’s things we can do with different processes.
• There’s things we do with better hardware.

All to speed up the recovery time.

Understanding your recovery time, and recovery point as well as the recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives are important. It is good to understand these and discuss them with management prior to having to actually do a recovery.

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