Managing placement of object replicas is performed at a first instance of a distributed storage system. One or more journals are opened for storage of object chunks. Each journal is associated with a single placement policy. A first object is received comprising at least a first object chunk. The first object is associated with a first placement policy. The first object chunk is stored in a first journal whose associated placement policy matches the first placement policy. The first journal stores only object chunks for objects whose placement policies match the first placement policy. For the first journal, the receiving and storing operations are repeated for multiple objects whose associated placement policies match the first placement policy, until a first termination condition occurs. Then, the first journal is closed. Subsequently, the first journal is replicated to a second instance of the distributed storage system according to the first placement policy.