DR 101: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) In disaster recovery the term Recovery Time Objective (RTO) can simply be defined as: “The time that it takes to recover data and applications”. This means that in the event of a disaster, such as a system wide virus, a user error deleting production data, or a key hardware failure, the RTO is the time it will take to recover from this disaster and have the data and applications back online and running in your recovery site.