An intelligent method of selecting a data recovery site upon receiving a data recovery request. The backup system collects historical activity data of the storage system to identify work load of every data recovery site. A predicted activity load for each data recovery site is then generated using the collected data. When a request for data recovery is received, the system first identifies which data recovery site has copies of the files to be recovered. Then it uses the predicted work load for these data recovery sites to determine whether to use a geographically local site or a site that may be remote geographically, but has a lower work load.