The system state recovery methods, systems and products disclosed herein enable an efficient means of recovering from a permanent site outage event in a distributed, block-based storage system. Embodiments teach using directory trees and journal updates for neighboring zones, which are still operational, as a means of recovering data for the site experiencing an outage. We further disclose load balancing techniques in order to improve efficiency of recovery. Load balancing is performed by selecting a leader zone and a group of non-leaders, which will comprise a set of recovery drivers. The systems within the set of recovery drivers are used to piece together lost data from the zone experiencing an outage. In embodiments, the systems, methods and products could be used with an Elastic Cloud System™.