US Patent 10089176 Incremental updates of grid encoded data storage systems

Techniques for incrementally updating grid encoding data storage systems are described herein. A grid of shards with a plurality of virtual shards is created where each virtual shard is a representation of a shard in the grid of shards that is not backed by a data storage device and where each shard of the grid of shards has an index value. Data is then stored in the grid of shards by updating a shard to store the data and by also updating a second shard based on a set of shards with the same index value as the shard updated to store the data.