What does Recovery Point Objective (RPO) measure in disaster recovery planning?

• A. Maximum acceptable data loss
• B. Maximum acceptable downtime
• C. Estimated time to recover without data
• D. Number of backups retained per year

Answer: (A)

Recovery Point Objective focuses on how much data loss an organization can tolerate after a disruption. It defines the largest amount of data that can be lost, usually expressed as a time window (for example, four hours). This objective drives how often backups or data replication must occur to meet that tolerance. So the correct choice captures the idea of “maximum acceptable data loss.”

The other ideas describe different concepts: the maximum acceptable downtime is about how long systems can be down (Recovery Time Objective), not how much data may be lost. The notion of time to recover without data isn’t a standard metric for RPO. The count of backups kept per year relates to general data retention, not the tolerance for data loss.