Peer-to-peer systems are foreseen as an efficient solution to achieve reliable data storage at low cost. To deal with common P2P problems such as peer failures or churn, such systems encode the user data into redundant fragments and distribute them among peers. The way they distribute it, known as placement policy, has a significant impact on their behavior and reliability. In this paper, we study the impact of different placement policies on the data life time. More precisely, we describe methods to compute and approximate the mean time before the system loses data (Mean Time to Data Loss). We compare this metric for three placement policies: two of them local, in which the data is stored in logical peer neighborhoods, and one of them global in which fragments are parted uniformly at random among the different peers.