Peer-to-peer systems are positioned to take advantage of gains in network bandwidth, storage capacity, and computational resources to provide long-term durable storage infrastructures. In this paper, we quantitatively compare building a distributed storage infrastructure that is self-repairing and resilient to faults using either a replicated system or an erasure-resilient system. We show that systems employing erasure codes have mean time to failures many orders of magnitude higher than

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... ted systems with similar storage and bandwidth requirements. More importantly, erasure-resilient systems use an order of magnitude less bandwidth and storage to provide similar system durability as replicated systems.