Backup Recovery Time Calculator

RPO is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. An RPO of 1 hour means you can lose up to 1 hour of data. RPO determines your backup frequency—if RPO is 1 hour, you need hourly backups or continuous replication. Financial and healthcare systems often require RPO near zero.

Downtime cost = (Revenue per hour) + (Productivity loss per hour) + (Recovery costs) + (Reputation damage). For a company with $10M annual revenue, that's roughly $1,140/hour in lost revenue alone. Add employee costs ($50/hour × employees affected), emergency IT costs, and customer compensation.

The 3-2-1 rule is a best practice: keep 3 copies of your data, on 2 different types of media, with 1 copy offsite. This protects against hardware failure (multiple copies), media-specific failures (different media types), and site disasters (offsite copy). Modern variants add air-gapped or immutable copies for ransomware protection.

Compare total cost of ownership: strategy cost + expected downtime cost + expected data loss cost. A $50K/year hot standby might seem expensive, but if your hourly downtime cost is $10K and you'd otherwise face 24+ hour outages, it pays for itself in one incident. Factor in probability of outages from your historical data.

Key factors include: data volume (TB to restore), network bandwidth, storage performance, application complexity, testing/validation time, and staff availability. A 10TB restore over 100Mbps takes 22+ hours for data transfer alone. Factor in application startup, database consistency checks, and user acceptance testing.