Described is a system for intelligently distributing the retrieval of recovery data amongst peer-based and cloud-based storage sources. The system may leverage a peer network by performing a recovery from a combination of sources including peer devices and a cloud-based storage by considering a multitude of factors. For example, the system may consider retrieval information (e.g. availability, performance metrics, retrieval costs, etc.) associated with each of the potential sources in combination with target information (e.g. recovery objectives, file recovery priorities, etc.) to create an ordering preference (e.g. ranking) for sources from which to retrieve recovery data. The system may rank the sources by determining a specialized recovery score for each source thereby allowing the intelligent retrieval of recovery data.