In data-intensive distributed systems, replication is the most widely used approach to offer high data availability, low bandwidth consumption, increased fault-tolerance and improved scalability of the overall system. Replication-based systems implement replica control protocols that enforce a specified semantics of accessing the data. Also, the performance depends on a host of factors chief of which is the protocol used to maintain consistency among object replica. In this paper, we propose a new low-cost and high data availability protocol for maintaining replicated data on networked distributed computing systems. We show that the proposed approach provides high data availability, low bandwidth consumption, increased fault-tolerance and improved scalability of the overall system as compared to standard replica control protocols.