# Ecommerce Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity > Ecommerce disaster recovery is the planned restoration of technology, data and integrations after a major failure. It defines objectives, recovery design, roles, steps and tests. Without a tested plan, recovery depends on improvisation during a high-pressure event, which increases the time customers cannot buy and the risk of data loss or duplicated transactions. - Type: Merchant guide - Level: Intermediate - Reading time: About 6 minutes - Audience: Written for store owners, builders, and designers refining high-performance ecommerce stores. - Last updated: 2026-11-04 - Canonical page: https://academy.getzenbasket.com/merchant-questions/ecommerce-disaster-recovery-and-business-continuity/ - Part of: [Merchant Questions](https://academy.getzenbasket.com/merchant-questions/) on ZenBasket Academy --- ## What you need to know ### What is ecommerce disaster recovery? Ecommerce disaster recovery is the planned restoration of technology, data and integrations after a major failure. It defines objectives, recovery design, roles, steps and tests. ### What is business continuity for ecommerce? Business continuity is the wider plan for continuing essential sales, fulfillment, support, finance and communication during disruption. Disaster recovery is the technology-recovery part of that plan. ### Disaster recovery vs backup: what's the difference? A backup provides recoverable data, while disaster recovery explains how the store, dependencies, people and procedures return to service within business objectives. Backups alone do not provide a working application. ### What is RTO? Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the target maximum time to restore a service after disruption. It guides the recovery design and must be tested rather than assumed. ### What is RPO? Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the target maximum amount of data loss measured backward in time. It determines how frequently or continuously data must be protected. ### RTO vs RPO: what's the difference? RTO limits acceptable downtime; RPO limits acceptable data loss. A store may target a short RTO but accept more data reconstruction, or require a short RPO while restoration takes longer. ### What should happen if the ecommerce database becomes unavailable? Stop unsafe writes, switch to a tested recovery path if available and communicate the affected journeys honestly. Restore or fail over data, verify consistency and reconcile orders and payments before normal processing resumes. ### How should merchants prepare for a major outage? Document contacts, decision authority, customer messages, manual workarounds, recovery steps and provider dependencies. Run tabletop and technical exercises, then update the plan from observed gaps. ### A quick store check Run a tabletop outage with named roles, RTO, RPO, recovery steps, communication paths and a written record of improvements. --- ## Frequently asked questions ### Does disaster recovery cover staff and suppliers? Yes. Technology recovery alone is insufficient if people, communication, warehouses or critical providers cannot operate. ### Can every system have a near-zero RTO and RPO? Technically ambitious objectives cost more and may still be unrealistic; set them from business impact and test whether the design meets them. --- ## Related learning path - **Ecommerce Backups and Recovery** - **Ecommerce Performance and Reliability Troubleshooting** - [ZenBasket Build Guide](https://help.getzenbasket.com/zenbasket-builder/)