Most conversations about backups jump straight to the techy stuff (what software, what storage, how often). But there are two plain questions worth answering first, and you don't need to know anything about computers to answer them. They're about your business, not your servers.
Get these two right and everything else falls into place. Skip them, and you end up either paying for protection you don't need or, far worse, finding out you didn't have enough.
Question one: how much work can you afford to lose?
Say your backup runs once, overnight. Everything gets saved at 2 a.m. while the office is empty. Now imagine you get hit at four in the afternoon. Everything done between 2 a.m. and 4 p.m., a whole day's work, is gone, because it was never saved anywhere but the machine that just died.
So the real question is: how much of that lost time would actually hurt? For some businesses, losing a day is annoying but survivable. You re-enter a few things and move on. For others, a day of orders, bookings or client work vanishing is a genuine catastrophe. If you're in the second group, backing up once a night isn't enough. You'd want it happening every few hours, or constantly.
Nobody can answer this for you, because it depends entirely on what a lost hour costs your particular business. But once you know roughly how much work you can stand to lose, you know how often you actually need to be saving copies.
Question two: how long can you be shut down?
This one's different, and people often mix it up with the first. It's not about losing data. It's about time. When everything stops, how long can the business stay frozen before the damage gets serious?
Picture the doors shut, the system down, nobody able to work. An hour of that? Probably fine, a bit of a headache. A full day? Now you're turning customers away. Three days? For a lot of small businesses, three days dark is the kind of thing you don't fully come back from. People go elsewhere and some don't return.
Your honest answer here decides how much it's worth spending to get back up quickly. If you can comfortably ride out a day, you don't need an expensive setup that restores everything in twenty minutes. If even a couple of hours down would bleed you badly, that fast recovery suddenly looks cheap by comparison.
RPO and RTO: why both numbers matter together
Here's the bit that ties it up. One number tells you how often to save your work. The other tells you how fast you need to be back running. They're not the same thing, and you can easily be fine on one while dangerously exposed on the other.
I've seen businesses with lovely, frequent backups, barely any data ever at risk, who then took four days to actually get everything working again, because nobody planned for speed. Their first number was great and their second was a disaster. Knowing both is what stops that nasty surprise.
And honestly, this is a thirty-minute conversation, not a technical project. Sit down, picture a bad day, and ask the two questions out loud: how much work could we lose without it really hurting, and how long could we be shut before it really hurts. Whatever numbers come out, that's your brief. It tells whoever sets up your backups exactly what you need, instead of guessing or overpaying.
If you ever hear an IT person say RPO and RTO, that's all they mean. RPO is how much work you can afford to lose. RTO is how long you can be down. Two everyday questions wearing intimidating names.
Never sat down and worked out your own two numbers? It's a short exercise, and it changes how you look at everything that comes after.
Work out your two numbers with us
A quick, no-obligation conversation. Sometimes it's easier with someone asking the questions.