High Availability and Disaster Recovery Are Not the Same — Here Is Why It Matters
A technical guide published on DEV Community explains the critical difference between high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR), two concepts engineers often mistakenly treat as interchangeable. HA ensures a system stays running through redundancy — such as multi-zone database replicas — so that a single component failure causes no downtime. DR, by contrast, is the plan for rebuilding after a catastrophic, region-wide or correlated failure that HA cannot address. Central to any DR strategy are two business-agreed metrics: Recovery Time Objective (RTO), measuring how long a system can be offline, and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), measuring how much data loss is acceptable. The article emphasizes that confusing the two concepts leads teams to either overspend on resilience or discover during a real outage that their backups are insufficient.
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