Many computer resources are so critical to a company's work that the integrity of these resources must be guaranteed. If changes to the data in the resources are corrupted by a hardware or software failure, human error, or a catastrophe, the computer must be able to restore the data. These critical resources are called protected resources or, sometimes, recoverable resources.

Resource recovery is the protection of the resources. Resource recovery consists of the protocols and program interfaces that allow an application program to make consistent changes to multiple protected resources.