How to Calculate RTO and RPO from Maximum Acceptable Downtime and Data Loss?

Quick Answer

RTO is 2 hours and RPO is 1 hour because these two metrics map directly onto the two constraints given in the scenario, and recognizing which constraint belongs to which metric is the whole exercise. Recovery Time Objective answers the question of how long the system can be down before the outage itself becomes unacceptable; it's a measure of downtime tolerance, and the scenario states that maximum acceptable downtime is 2 hours, so that figure is the RTO by definition. Recovery Point Objective answers a different question: how much data can be afforded to lose, measured as a span of time since the last good backup or replication point; it's not about how long systems are down, but about how far back in time the restored data will be relative to the moment of failure. The scenario's maximum acceptable data loss of 1 hour maps directly onto RPO. These two metrics drive very different technical decisions: RTO shapes how fast your recovery process and failover mechanisms need to be, while RPO shapes how frequently you need to back up or replicate data, since a 1-hour RPO requires backups or replication running at least that often. Whenever a question gives you a downtime tolerance and a data-loss tolerance separately, match downtime to RTO and data loss to RPO; they are never interchangeable, even though both are expressed in units of time.