Disclosed herein are systems and method for disaster recovery using application streaming. In one aspect, a method includes generating a backup image of a computing system having at least one installed application and user data. The generating involves including the user data in the backup image and actively excluding program data files of the at least one installed application from the backup image. The method includes determining an application package specifying the installed application. The application package is stored at an application streaming service. Responsive to detecting a disaster recovery event, the method further includes copying the user data from the backup image to a recovery computing instance, and executing, on the recovery computing instance, a remote application from the application streaming service based on the determined application package.