example apparatus and methods combine erasure coding with data deduplication to simultaneously reduce the overall redundancy in data while increasing the redundancy of unique data . in one embodiment , an efficient representation of a data set is produced by deduplication . the efficient representation reduces duplicate data in the data set . redundancy is then added back into the data set using erasure coding . the redundancy that is added back in adds protection to the unique data associated with the efficient representation . how much redundancy is added back in and what type of redundancy is added back in may be controlled based on an attribute of the unique data . decisions concerning how much and what type of redundancy to add back in may be adapted over time based , for example , on observations of the efficiency of the overall system .