Patent ID: 7844712

Claim:
A method for retrieving erasure-coded fragments associated with essentially sequential segments, comprising: requesting, by an assembling device from a plurality of fractional-storage servers, a first set of the erasure-coded fragments, using a fragment pull protocol, each fragment pull request associated with a specific segment; wherein erasure-coding denotes a process in which a sequence of erasure-coded fragments are generated from a segment such that the segment can be reconstructed from essentially any subset of the erasure-coded fragments having minimum size not smaller than the size of the segment; wherein each fractional-storage server configured to store at least one erasure-coded fragment but less than the minimum amount of fragments or data required to reconstruct the segments; requesting a second set of erasure-coded fragments, using the fragment pull protocol, to compensate for the fragments of the first-set that failed to arrive at the assembling device; and while requesting the first set of fragments associated with a certain segment, requesting on-the-fly the second set of fragments associated with a prior segment, wherein the first set of fragments associated with the certain segment and the second set of fragments associated with the prior segment are of essentially the same erasure-coding and therefore can be decoded together.