Systems and methods for backing up or restoring interdependent applications. During a backup or recovery process, the writers and writer components included in the backup groupings of a client are displayed. Some of the writers and writer components can be individually selected for backup or recovery. Some of the writer components may have a dependency on a writer component in another writer. The dependency is automatically selected, although a user can disable the automatic selection of the dependency or deselect the dependency. The dependency is then backed up or recovered along with the selected writers and selected writer components.