Data protection systems and methods may be used to automatically gather and assemble configuration information needed for the successful recovery of distributed applications running on several servers. In one implementation, a data protection system includes a collection module and a recovery report generation module. The collection module may gather configuration information regarding several servers used by a distributed application. The configuration information may include information regarding data archived from the servers and information for restoring the archived data, such as hardware configurations and path locations of original data stored on the servers and of archived data. The recovery report generation module may assemble recovery instructions based on the configuration information. The recovery instructions may be usable for restoring the distributed computing system in the event of a disaster or other failure involving one or more of the servers.