1. A method comprising the steps of: (a) assembling a list of unavailable storage nodes; (b) compiling a list of affected data segments contained on the unavailable storage nodes; (c) determining a list of data slices needed to rebuild the affected data segments; (d) reading the data slices needed to rebuild the affected data segments from associated storage nodes; (e) rebuilding the affected data segments from the data slices; (f) creating new data slices from the rebuilt data segment using an information dispersal algorithm; and (g) writing the new data slices associated with the unavailable storage nodes to different storage nodes; wherein the step of creating new data slices comprises partitioning a data segment into a set of data slices, and creating an encoded data subset by summing a modulo of at least two data slices within a collection of data slices; and wherein the step of writing further includes storing each data slice along with its corresponding encoded data subset in the storage node; and wherein the step of rebuilding the data segments comprises combining a subset of the data slices and the encoded data subsets required to reproduce the data segment from less than all of the original data slices.