RPO

How it works

• It is the gap between the last good copy and the moment of failure.
• A weekly backup means up to a week of lost work.
• Pick a number for each system, since payroll and a shared photo folder need different answers.

What can go wrong (example scenario)

A four-person online retailer backed up weekly. A database corruption on Friday took them back to the previous Saturday. Six days of orders, customer accounts and inventory changes had to be rebuilt by hand from emails and receipts.

How WILDCARD handles it

Unified Backups runs Cloud Backups and Computer Backups on schedules that fit each system. Deciding the right RPO for each one is a recovery-planning conversation, which vCIO puts on paper.

• A dental office sets a one-hour RPO on the practice management database and nightly on everything else.
• A law firm sets a near-continuous RPO on email and the document system.
• A contractor accepts a daily RPO on job files because a day's drawings are easy to redo.

Example scenario: A small accounting firm's server failed at 3 p.m. on a payroll day. Their RPO was four hours, so the restore came back to the 11 a.m. copy. Two staff re-entered the afternoon's work in under an hour, and payroll went out on time.

A question owners ask

What RPO should a small business aim for?

Hourly or better for whatever holds money and client records, and daily for the rest. Pick the number by imagining losing that much and asking how bad it would be.