Scientists have found a way to store all of humanity's most important data inside a piece of glass — and it could last longer than civilisation itself.
From floppy disks to USBs, keeping important historical or personal data safe is a constant technological challenge.
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But scientists have found a new storage solution that could last for more than 10,000 years: laser writing in glass.
Despite the buzz around data centres and cloud storage, they rely on hard disks and magnetic tapes, which do have a certain lifespan and have to be replaced. The process requires the data to be copied onto new hard disks.
Researchers have suggested that storing data in glass, which could include scientific research papers or historical documents, may be a way to preserve data for future civilisations. But so far, it has been impossible to do so.
Scientists from Microsoft in Cambridge, United Kingdom, say they have now found a way to do that with a special laser.
The system works by using a special laser that can turn data, in the form of bits, into groups of symbols. They are then encoded as tiny deformations, known as voxels, in a piece of glass.
The voxels can then be read by sweeping the glass under an automated microscope with a camera.
The laser fires at 10 MHz — 10 million pulses per second — and each pulse writes one voxel, so data is written at the laser's maximum repetition rate.
By adjusting the depth of focus, the laser can write into hundreds of distinct layers stacked through the 2mm thickness of the glass.
In one 2-millimetre-deep piece of glass, it can store 4.84 terabytes of data, which is about the same as two million books.
Known as Project Silica, the findings were presented in the journal Nature.
