US Patent 12014056 Slice file recovery using dead replica slice files

Techniques are provided for repairing a primary slice file, affected by a storage device error, by using one or more dead replica slice files. The primary slice file is used by a node of a distributed storage architecture as an indirection layer between storage containers (e.g., a volume or LUN) and physical storage where data is physically stored. To improve resiliency of the distributed storage architecture, changes to the primary slice file are replicated to replica slice files hosted by other nodes. If a replica slice file falls out of sync with the primary slice file, then the replica slice file is considered dead (out of sync) and could potentially comprise stale data. If a storage device error affects blocks storing data of the primary slice file, then the techniques provided herein can repair the primary slice file using non-stale data from one or more dead replica slice files.