Provided is a system and method for converting active data identified by a garbage collection operation into erasure coded fragments. In one example, the method may include identifying data blocks in use and interspersed among garbage data blocks not in use in cloud storage based on a garbage collection operation, extracting object data from the identified data blocks in use into a data container while leaving object data of the garbage data blocks not in use, and fragmenting a predetermined amount of extracted object data stored within the data container, the fragmenting comprising converting the predetermined amount of object data into a plurality of fragments including data fragments storing portions of the data and parity fragments for reconstructing the data, and writing the plurality of fragments in a distributed manner among a plurality of storage nodes.