Patent attributes
Methods for distributed storage in accordance with embodiments of the invention enable secret sharing. One embodiment includes encoding source data using an encoding system to produce a plurality of sets of encoded data, where: the source data can be recovered from at least a portion of less than all of the plurality of sets of encoded data; and the source data cannot be recovered using less than a threshold number of the plurality of sets of encoded data; storing each of the plurality of sets of encoded data on a storage device from a set of storage devices on which encoded data is stored; determining a set of storage devices that are available using a decoding system, where the set of storage devices that are available does not include all of the storage devices in the set of storage devices on which encoded data is stored.