The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) are basic concepts related to the information to be recovered and the time that it will take to recover. In a Recovery Design plan, it is essential to define the time required to restore the data and how much data we can lose in the recovery.
The RPO defines the objective related to the point of recovery. In some cases, we can lose one hour of data, and sometimes we can lose 1 entire day of data. Therefore, defining the RPO at the beginning is critical to design the plan. The same applies to the RTO.
In this article, we will talk about both RPO and RTO, and also discuss how to design the right backup and restore strategy.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is a proportion of how often it is necessary to take backups. On the off chance that a disaster happens between backups, would you be able to stand to lose ten minutes of information refreshes? Or then again ten hours? Or then again, an entire full day? RPO addresses how new recuperated information will be. The RPO shows the measure of information (refreshed or made) that will be lost or should be restored after a blackout.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) isn't just the length of time between the disaster and recovery. The goal additionally represents the means IT team should take to reestablish the application and its information. In the event that IT team has put resources into failover administrations for high-need applications, they can securely communicate RTO in short order.
How to Design the Right Backup and Restore Strategy to Meet Business Goals?
To reduce the RTO, you need to consider combining the transaction log backups and differential backups in your strategy. If you only make full backups, the time to restore the data may be too high. Using differential backups can help reduce the recovery time.
Here are some tips to consider when doing a backup:
- Make sure to store the backup on a different server. This will prevent you from losing data in case the server is damaged.
- Use fast hard disks. The backup and restore will be faster if you use hardware with good performance. This will help reach the RTO.
- Use differential backups to reduce the number of transactional files used to restore. The differential backups allow to restore the data faster and to get the RTO.
- Estimate how often the data changes. If your data does not change too much during the day, you can make one single differential backup each day and a weekly full backup. On the other hand, if your database has several transactions per minute, you will need to combine full, differential, and transactional backups to recover all the data in the correct RPO.
- Always test your backup and make sure that RPO and RTO are accomplished on your tests. You will test that the integrity of the data is fine. It is recommended to have a production environment and a testing environment to verify the backups.
- Make sure to automate the backup and restore strategy by using jobs. The backups should run in a schedule that depends on how the RTO and RPO are designed.
- If your database is big, using the MAXTRANSFERSIZE and the BUFFERCOUNT may help. These arguments will allow you to increase the size and the buffer. This way you will be able to restore the database faster.
- Use database and backup compression to increase the speed of the backup.
Use Stellar Repair for MS SQL for Faster Recovery
There is also another way to recover information in a fast and secure way. Stellar Repair for MS SQL is a well-known third-party software that helps recover data from a corrupt or damaged database. It can also repair damaged databases. If you want to know more about this software, please visit the website here.