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How should a system's Recovery Time Objective compare with its Maximum Tolerable Downtime?

The RTO must normally be shorter than the MTD.

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  1. Longer than the MTD
  2. Shorter than the MTD ✔
  3. Exactly twice the MTD

Why: MTD is the longest outage the business can accept. Recovery must finish before that limit, with time left to reprocess data. So the RTO has to come in under the MTD.

Huh, didn't know that: NIST gives an example where extra reprocessing time after an outage must also fit inside the MTD.

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What did the computer say to the cute iPhone at the bar? "Wanna get out of here and grab a byte?"
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References

Answer: Shorter than the MTD. MTD is the longest outage the business can accept. Recovery must finish before that limit, with time left to reprocess data. So the RTO has to come in under the MTD.

  1. NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1, Contingency Planning Guide for Federal Information Systems nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-34r1.pdf
    the RTO must normally be shorter than the MTD
    Checked 2026-10-10.

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