Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
The maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. If RPO is 1 hour, you can lose up to 1 hour of data in a disaster.
Impact
RPO dictates your backup frequency and replication strategy. Zero RPO requires synchronous replication (expensive).
Weinto take
We aim for Zero RPO for critical transactional data using distributed consensus (like Raft/Paxos in modern DBs). For non-critical data, we accept higher RPO to save costs. It's a business trade-off, not just technical.