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Mean time to recovery

Also known as MTTR

The average time taken to restore service after a failure.

Tracked over time it shows whether recovery capability is genuinely improving or whether each incident is handled from scratch. It covers the whole span from failure to service restored, including detection and decision time.

It is frequently far longer than the technical restore itself, because the hours spent working out what happened and who can authorize the fix count too.

Where this comes up

Mean time to recovery sits inside our backup and disaster recovery work. If you are trying to work out what this means for your own environment rather than in the abstract, that is the page worth reading next, and a short call will get you a straight answer faster than either.

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Related terms

Recovery time objective The maximum time a system can be unavailable before the impact becomes unacceptable. Restore test Actually recovering data from backup to verify the backup works and the process is understood. Incident response The structured process of detecting, containing, eradicating, and recovering from a security incident. Uptime The proportion of time a system is available, usually expressed as a percentage over a period.

More in backup and disaster recovery

3-2-1 ruleAir-gapped backupBackupBackup windowBare metal restoreBusiness impact analysisCloud backupDeduplication

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