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-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.
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