I have been also looking for answers for the same questions and didn't found any. IMHO the redundancy for the files to stay safe will have to be an order of magnitude greater than the traditional storage, making the storage in the Storj network too expensive. Considering that the "miners" will mine as far as it's profitable to do it, this could pose a BIG risk for the persistency of data stored in Storj.
Not really... Amazon makes 3 copies when you use their storage, so Storj isn't an order of magnitude at all... Outside of Storj, any existing, traditional redundancies use a "magnitude" depending on redundancy chosen.
Storj will make 3 copies by default, and if you want more, you can specify that in your contract and pay more for it... So I dont understand your "orders of magnitude" concern. Can you explain more what you men by it? Btw, have you read the white paper yet?
When I say an order of magnitude greater, I mean that to achieve the SAME safety of for example a RAID1 storage where 2 disks would represent 2 nodes you would need 20 nodes (I am just speculating). With just 3 copies of your data in a decentralized network, the probability of data loss is _much_ higher than using centralized options. But maybe there are other use cases for STORJ.
One way it could work is if miners get as specialized as in Bitcoin, but of course you need a growing economic model for this, and again that would defeat the purpose of decentralization as is already happening with Bitcoin.
It doesn't really work that way... Take a look at the white paper.