Embodiments include obtaining at least one system metric of a distributed storage system, generating one or more recovery parameters based on the at least one system metric, identifying at least one policy associated with data stored in a storage node of a plurality of storage nodes in the distributed storage system, and generating a recovery plan for the data based on the one or more recovery parameters and the at least one policy. In more specific embodiments, the recovery plan includes a recovery order for recovering the data. Further embodiments include initiating a recovery process to copy replicas of the data from a second storage node to a new storage node, wherein the replicas of the data are copied according to the recovery order indicated in the recovery plan.