[shermantanktop]

The article offered that example as an extreme, impractical, but easy-to-imagine case to show the utility of using codes over smaller data segments. I read this article as a discussion about data entropy, data encoding, and information theory.

Nowhere did they suggest that concatenating zillions of emails could be a real world system, or that such a system would be good or practical, or that any actual real system used this approach.

What you describe with Backblaze is using redundant storage to sidestep the problem, so it's apples and oranges.

[epcoa]

Sidestep what problem? Backblaze is a practical application of Reed-Solomon coding. And the article text is " With a Reed-Solomon code, you’d need to perform a massive computation involving all the encoded data to recover your emails from that one lost server. " How is it apples and oranges?

Reed-Solomon coding is redundant, that's the whole point.

[iforgotpassword]

This is theoretical work. It was just an example trying to illustrate the difference.