Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the target time to restore service. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. A service may have a short RTO but a large RPO if it can be restored quickly from an older backup.

Backups must be isolated from the failure modes they protect against, encrypted, access-controlled, and tested. A backup that has never been restored is an unverified assumption. Include point-in-time recovery, retention policy, deletion protection, and recovery of configuration, keys, and dependencies.

Disaster recovery strategies range from backup-and-restore to pilot light, warm standby, and active-active regions. Cost and complexity increase as recovery becomes faster. Exercise region loss, credential compromise, accidental deletion, and corrupted data scenarios; failover alone does not fix bad data replicated everywhere.