> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.cockroachlabs.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Disaster Recovery Overview

Resilient deployments aim for continuity in database operations to protect from data loss and downtime. To maintain resiliency, it is necessary to build deployments with *high availability* and *disaster recovery* coverage.

* [High availability](#choose-a-high-availability-strategy): Continuously access data without interruption even in the presence of failures or disruptions to maximize uptime.
* [Disaster recovery](#choose-a-disaster-recovery-strategy): Recover from a major incident or disaster to minimize downtime and data loss.

To build resilient cluster deployments, CockroachDB provides both [built-in replication](https://docs.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v24.2/architecture/replication-layer) for high availability and disaster recovery features for coverage during unplanned incidents.

> [!TIP]
>
> For a practical guide on how CockroachDB replicates, distributes, and rebalances data, refer to the [Replication and Rebalancing](https://docs.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v24.2/demo-replication-and-rebalancing) demo.

## Resilience strategy

As you evaluate CockroachDB's disaster recovery features, consider your organization's requirements for the amount of tolerable data loss and the acceptable length of time to recover.

* Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum amount of data loss (measured by time) that an organization can tolerate.
* Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum length of time it should take to restore normal operations following an outage.

For example, when you use backups:

![Simulating RPO and RTO. With RPO representing the tolerable data loss, and RTO representing the tolerable time to recovery.](https://mintcdn.com/cockroachlabs/iiBVxthghoAOO3UM/images/common/rpo-rto.png?fit=max\&auto=format\&n=iiBVxthghoAOO3UM\&q=85\&s=a351ee446a3997d921dd8ef95db6ad17)

For a comparison of CockroachDB resiliency features, refer to the following sections:

* [Choose a high availability strategy](#choose-a-high-availability-strategy)
* [Choose a disaster recovery strategy](#choose-a-disaster-recovery-strategy)

### Choose a high availability strategy

CockroachDB uses synchronous, built-in replication to create and distribute copies of data, ensuring consistency across the data copies. The database can tolerate nodes going offline without service interruption, whether in a single-region or [multi-region](https://docs.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v24.2/multiregion-overview) cluster.

| | Single-region replication (synchronous) | Multi-region replication (synchronous) |
| - | - | - |
| RPO | 0 seconds | 0 seconds |
| RTO | Zero RTO Potential increased latency for 1-9 seconds | Zero RTO Potential increased latency for 1-9 seconds |
| Write latency | Region-local write latency p50 latency \< 5ms (for multiple availability zones in us-east1) | Cross-region write latency p50 latency > 50ms (for a multi-region cluster in us-east1, us-east-2, us-west-1) |
| Recovery | Automatic | Automatic |
| Hardware cost | 1x Networking between availability zones | 1x Networking between datacenters |
| Minimum regions | 1 | 3 |
| Fault tolerance | Zero RPO node, availability zone failures | Zero RPO node, availability zone failures, region failures |

For details on designing your cluster topology for high availability with replication, refer to the [Disaster Recovery Planning](https://docs.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v24.2/disaster-recovery-planning#hardware-failure) page.

### Choose a disaster recovery strategy

CockroachDB is designed to recover automatically; however, building [backups](https://docs.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v24.2/backup-and-restore-overview) or [physical cluster replication](https://docs.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v24.2/physical-cluster-replication-overview) into your disaster recovery planning is an important part of a resilient deployment.

| | Point in time backup & restore | Physical cluster replication (asynchronous) |
| - | - | - |
| RPO | >=5 minutes | 10s of seconds |
| RTO | Minutes to hours, depending on data size and number of nodes | Seconds to minutes, depending on cluster size |
| Write latency | No impact | No impact |
| Recovery | Manual restore | Manual failover |
| Hardware cost | 1x + S3-like storage & networking | 2x + networking between datacenters |
| Minimum regions | 1 | 2 |
| Fault tolerance | Not applicable | Zero RPO node, availability zone, region failure with loss up to RPO |