Technology is disclosed for storing data in a distributed storage system using a virtual chunk service (VCS). In the VCS based storage technique, a storage node (“node”) is split into multiple VCSs and each of the VCSs can be assigned a unique ID in the distributed storage. A set of VCSs from a set of nodes form a storage group, which also can be assigned a unique ID in the distributed storage. When a data object is received for storage, a storage group is identified for the data object, the data object is encoded to generate multiple fragments and each fragment is stored in a VCS of the identified storage group. The data recovery process is made more efficient by using metadata, e.g., VCS to storage node mapping, storage group to VCS mapping, VCS to objects mapping, which eliminates resource intensive read and write operations during recovery.