Enter the recovery objectives you can actually defend to the business, and see which recovery pattern they imply — along with the operational commitment that comes with it.
Why the stricter objective decides
Recovery time and recovery point are independent requirements, and the more demanding of the two sets the pattern. A workload that can be down for hours but cannot lose a single transaction still needs continuous replication; the relaxed downtime tolerance buys you nothing on the data side. Teams that size against the friendlier of the two objectives discover the gap during their first real incident.
The number that is usually wrong
Most stated recovery objectives have never been tested. An objective is a measurement, not an aspiration — and the only way to know yours is to rehearse the recovery and time it, including the parts that involve a person finding a runbook at three in the morning. A tested four-hour recovery is worth considerably more than an untested one-hour target.
The patterns themselves are covered in more depth in Backup and disaster recovery and High availability design.