This paper studies the performance of Peer-to-Peer Storage Systems (P2PSS) in terms of data lifetime and availability. Two schemes for recovering lost data are modeled through absorbing Markov chains and their performance are evaluated and compared. The first scheme relies on a centralized controller that can recover multiple losses at once, whereas the second scheme is distributed and recovers one loss at a time. The impact of each system parameter on the performance is evaluated, and guidelines are derived on how to engineer the system and tune its key parameters in order to provide desired lifetime and/or availability of data. We find that, in stable environments such as local area or research laboratory networks where machines are usually highly available, the distributed-repair scheme offers a reliable, scalable and cheap storage/backup solution. This is in contrast with the case of highly dynamic environments, where the distributed-repair scheme is inefficient as long as the storage overhead is kept reasonable. P2PSS with centralized-repair scheme are efficient in any environment but have the disadvantage of relying on a centralized authority. Our analysis also suggests that the use of large size fragments reduces the efficiency of the recovery mechanism.