A system, method and apparatus are provided for encoding and decoding a source file. The source file is encoded by dividing it into a plurality of shares comprised of a plurality of packets. A bit vector is generated. For at least one share, an FEC packet is generated by XOR'ing a subset of packets from the plurality of packets in the share in accordance with the bit vector. The process of encoding continues until terminated. Once the FEC encoded packets are received, each of the plurality of packets which is not a linear combination of previously received packets is stored into a file. A sequence of XOR operations to perform in-place on the file to reconstruct the source file are generated and performed on the file.