An Updating No Sync (UNS) technique ensures continuous data protection for content driven distribution of data served by storage nodes of a fault tolerant cluster in the event of a degraded cluster state. A storage service implemented in each node includes one or more slice services (SSs) configured to process and store metadata describing the data served by the storage nodes and one or more block services (BSs) configured to process and store the data on storage devices of the node. A bin assignment service may coopt one or more healthy BSs to temporarily store updates of data and metadata received at the SS while the cluster is in the degraded state as an overflow data path (hence the term “Updating No Sync,” which denotes updating without synchronizing, i.e., not distributing the data within the cluster, but only accumulating an overflow of SS information). Once the cluster is no longer degraded, the accumulated overflow SS information at the BSs may be synchronized back to restored BSs, i.e., according to write path determination in the absence of node failure/unavailability.