A multiple protection group (MPG) erasure-resilient coding method for constructing MPG codes for encoding and decoding data. The MPG codes constructed herein protect data chunks of data in multiple protection groups and subgroups. In general, the MPG erasure-resilient codes are constructed by locating data chunks into multiple protection groups and assigning at least one parity chunk to each protection group. Basic MPG codes are constructed from existing Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes by splitting at least some of the parity chunks into local parities for each of the multiple protection groups and projecting local parities onto each of the groups. Generalized MPG codes have a Maximally Recoverable property that can be used to determine whether an erasure pattern is recoverable or unrecoverable. Generalized MPG codes can recover any erasure pattern that is recoverable.