Microsoft’s Project Silica offers robust thousand-year storage

Not strictly Linux or open source related, but I wouldn't mind having
a backup that lasts longer than just a few years!

'Ars spoke Tuesday with Dr. Ant Rowstron, a principal researcher at
Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, about an innovative cold storage
project called Silica. Silica aims to replace both tape and optical
archival discs as the media of choice for large-scale, (very) long
duration cold storage. Microsoft Research is partnering with film
giant Warner Bros., which is directly interested in reducing costs and
increasing reliability in its own cold storage programs.

The medium in question is a block of high-purity glass, which has
voxels etched into it with femtosecond lasers. Each voxel stores
multiple bits in two properties, retardance and angle, which may in
turn be read using microscope imaging and polarized light. Voxels may
be written 100 or more layers deep in a 2mm-deep piece of glass, by
focusing the laser to the desired depth within the block itself.

The speed of both reads and writes to Silica currently leave something
to be desired—it took approximately a week to etch Superman's roughly
76GB of data last year, and Rowstron estimates it would take about
three days to re-read the data, with advances made since. The
technology is still in its infancy, of course, and large decreases in
time required for both writing and reading are expected moving
forward. Rowstron says he still doesn't expect anyone is likely to try
to actually play Superman directly from its Silica record—but that's
not what it's intended for.'

-- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/microsofts-project-silica-offers-robust-thousand-year-storage/

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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