Cohorts may be created on storage nodes in an object-redundant storage system that uses replication and/or a redundant encoding technique. In a cohort with N nodes, M data elements (replicas or shards) of an object are stored to M of the nodes that are randomly (or otherwise) selected from the N nodes. Metadata for locating other data elements for an object in the cohort may be stored with one or more of the data elements in the cohort. To retrieve an object from a cohort, a subset of the nodes may be queried; the subset may be randomly or otherwise selected. If enough data elements are retrieved for the object from the queried nodes, the object is provided to the requester. Otherwise, additional data elements may be retrieved according to the metadata returned with a data element or by querying additional nodes.