An embodiment of a method of estimating storage system availability begins with a first step of modeling a storage system design in operation under a workload to determine location of retrieval points. The retrieval points provide sources for primary storage recovery for a plurality of failure scenarios. For a particular failure scenario, the method continues with a second step of finding a secondary storage location of a most recent retrieval point relative to a target recovery time that is available for recovery. A third step determines a recovery time for propagation of the most recent retrieval point from the secondary storage location to primary storage.