A method of recovering information missing from a virtual file system is implemented at a computing device that is communicatively connected to one or more storage devices. Upon receipt of a request for a file associated with an instance of the virtual file system, the computing device retrieves a set of blocks associated with the file from one of the storage devices and identifies one or more of the set of blocks as missing blocks after failing to retrieve the missing blocks from the storage devices. For each missing block, the computing device retrieves one or more parity blocks from one of the storage devices and computes the missing block by applying a predefined recovery scheme to the retrieved parity blocks. Finally, the computing device reconstructs the requested file using the computed missing blocks and other blocks associated with the requested file.