How much recent work you can afford to lose — the age of your newest backup.
Recovery point objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of recent work you are willing to lose when something goes wrong — measured in time since the last successful backup.
RPO and RTO together form the two questions every backup plan has to answer. RPO answers: how much data can you afford to lose? RTO answers: how long can you afford to be down? If your backup ran at 9am and your drive dies at 4pm, you lose seven hours of work — that seven-hour gap is your actual recovery point. If seven hours would sting but not ruin you, a daily backup is fine. If losing even an hour of edits would blow up a client deadline, you need continuous backup with an RPO measured in minutes.
Most scheduled backup tools give you an RPO of twenty-four hours at best. That was acceptable in an era where the only thing on a Mac was documents. For a photographer on deadline, a developer mid-refactor, or anyone whose livelihood lives in unsaved Logic sessions, it is not.
In macup, the default RPO is a few minutes. macup watches filesystem events and queues changes as they happen, so by the time you have finished saving a file it is usually already on its way to the repository — no schedule, no 2am window, no lost afternoon.