RPO, or Recovery Point Objective, defines the maximum amount of data an organization can afford to lose in a disaster, expressed as a time duration. It answers the question: "If we restore from backup, how much data loss is acceptable?"
For example, an RPO of 1 hour means your backup and replication strategy must ensure that you can recover data from no more than 1 hour ago. An RPO of zero means no data loss is acceptable, which requires real-time synchronous replication.
RPO drives decisions about backup frequency, replication strategy, and storage architecture. A 24-hour RPO might be satisfied by daily backups, while a 5-minute RPO requires near-continuous replication. RPO and RTO together define the recovery requirements for a system — RPO addresses data loss while RTO addresses downtime duration.