What is mean time to recovery?

Mean time to recovery is the average time between something breaking and the business working again. It is the honest measure of a continuity plan:

• It counts the whole outage - detection, diagnosis, the fix, and getting back to normal work.
• It is measured, not estimated - which is why it only becomes real once you have rehearsed or lived through an incident.
• Compare it with your RTO - if recovery routinely takes longer than the target you set, the plan is aspirational.

Write down what the last outage actually cost you in time. That is your starting number.