How to Build a Disaster Recovery Plan: A Complete Guide

Frequently Asked Questions

01.What is the difference between RTO and RPO?

The recovery time objective is how long a system may stay in recovery before the business is harmed. The recovery point objective is the point in time to which data must be recovered after an outage (NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1, November 2010). In practice, RTO decides how much standby infrastructure you pay for, and RPO decides how often you back up or replicate. Set both per business function, with the function's owner signing them.

02.How much does disaster recovery cost on AWS?

It depends on the strategy and the data volume. In AWS's own Elastic Disaster Recovery example for 100 on-premises servers and 30TB replicating into US East (N. Virginia), the service fee is 2,044 dollars a month and the four standing line items come to about 6,400 dollars a month, with storage the largest part (AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery pricing, October 2026). Backup and restore costs less because no compute runs in the recovery Region, and active-active costs most because a full second fleet serves traffic.

03.How often should a disaster recovery plan be tested?

At least once a year, plus after substantive changes to systems supporting critical or important functions, which is the floor EU DORA Article 11(6) sets for most financial entities outside the Article 16 simplified regime (Regulation (EU) 2022/2554, December 2022). Quarterly is a sensible cadence for revenue systems because drills are cheap: AWS's example puts an 8-hour drill of 100 servers at 122.94 dollars in compute and storage (AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery pricing, October 2026).

04.Is data replication enough for disaster recovery?

No. Continuous replication shortens the recovery point, but AWS notes it may not protect against data corruption or malicious deletion as well as point-in-time backups (AWS disaster recovery whitepaper, October 2026). A replica copies a bad write as faithfully as a good one. Keep point-in-time backups in a separate account and Region alongside any replica, and test restoring from them.