recovery time
also: RTO, Recovery Time Objective
Recovery time is the duration required for a system or service to return to normal operation after a failure, outage, or disaster.
Recovery time measures how long it takes to restore functionality following an interruption. This includes diagnosing the problem, applying fixes, and bringing the system back online—but not necessarily restoring all data to its pre-failure state.
Recovery time is closely related to Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which is a business goal specifying the maximum acceptable downtime. For example, if an RTO is 1 hour, your recovery processes must restore service within 60 minutes of failure detection.
In practice, recovery time depends on factors like backup availability, system complexity, and automation. A web server with automated failover might recover in seconds; a database with manual intervention might take hours. Administrators use techniques like redundancy, replication, and automated recovery scripts to minimize recovery time.