Elizabeth Gibney in Nature:
Researchers at Microsoft have created a data-storage system that can remain readable for at least 10,000 years — and probably much longer.
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-centimetrewide, 2-millimetre-thick square of the glass can store 4.8 terabytes of data, the equivalent of around two million printed books, the authors demonstrate in their paper published in Nature on 18 February.
More here.
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