Information for the future

I always like reading about research into really, really long term data storage methods, and have posted about it before.  It's nice to see it's still a pursuit, and that Superman's crystal storage methods may be real:

In the digital age, the need for data storage is ballooning. But current magnetic tapes and hard drives are ill-suited for long-term data storage because they degrade in about ten years. This “impressive” glass-based alternative could “in principle, act as near-permanent archival storage for backup of critical data,” says Mark Bathe, a biological engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

The Microsoft team used a high-energy laser to imprint deformations into a 3D chunk of borosilicate glass, the kind used in ovenware. Each deformation encodes data that can be read out using a microscope.

A 12-centimetre wide, 2-millimetre-thick square of the glass can store 4.8 terabytes of data, the equivalent of around 2 million printed books, the authors demonstrate in their paper published in Nature on 18 February1.

Writing and reading the data is considerably more convoluted than opening a file on a hard drive, but the information is much more secure. Tests suggest that the data would survive for 10,000 years at a temperature of 290 ºC and potentially for tens or hundreds of times longer at room temperature, says Richard Black, a computer scientist who led the initiative known as Project Silica at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK.

Although the glass method requires specialist hardware to write and read data, the paper demonstrates that glass storage has gone beyond a materials experiment and is now a “deployable archival system”, says Long Qian, a computational synthetic biologist at Peking University in Beijing.

“By showing a complete system … they have shown how this technology can truly revolutionize the data-centre industry,” says Peter Kazansky, a researcher in optoelectronics at the University of Southampton, UK, and a previous collaborator with Microsoft on glass storage.