Foundation · 2 min
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.
Foundation · 2 min
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.