New Delhi, February 19 Encoding data into glass using lasers could be a promising avenue for storing vast amounts of data for more than 10,000 years, as the technique is resistant to moisture, temperature changes, and electromagnetic interference, according to a study.
The Project Silica team at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, said the technology could prove effective for the long-term storage of legal, personal, and commercial data that needs to be successfully preserved.
Current techniques for preserving data, such as magnetic tapes or hard disk drives, degrade after a few years or decades, making them unsuitable for long-term storage.
The team said they are presenting an archival data storage system called 'Silica' – which is described in a paper in the journal Nature – that writes data into glass using a multi-beam femtosecond laser.
The authors report an optical archival storage technology based on femtosecond laser direct writing in glass that addresses the practical demands of archival storage, which they call "Silica."
"Optical storage approaches, particularly laser writing in robust media such as glass, have emerged as promising alternatives with the potential for increased longevity," they said.
However, previous studies have largely optimized individual aspects of archival data storage using laser-modified glass, such as data density, but not an "end-to-end system, including writing, storing, and retrieving information," the team said.
The system can encode units of data called voxels – three-dimensional pixels – into glass, which are each capable of storing more than one bit of data, the researchers said.
They added that the system has a writing capacity of 65.9 megabits of data per second for a data density of 1.59 gigabit per cubic millimeter or 4.84 terabytes in a 12-square-centimeter, 2-millimeter-deep piece of glass.
"This storage is equivalent to about two million printed books or 5,000 ultra-high-definition 4K films," according to Feng Chen and Bo Wu from China's Shandong University in an associated News and Views article, who were not involved with the study.
The Project Silica team conducted experiments to gauge the estimated lifetime of Silica, which suggest that the data could be readable for up to 10,000 years if stored at 290 degrees Celsius, indicating that it could likely last longer at room temperature.
However, a limitation of the study's lifetime experiments is that the lifetime estimates did not account for influences such as mechanical stress or chemical corrosion, which can degrade the glass media and its data, the authors said.
Chen and Wu said Silica "unites performance, durability, and practical feasibility, transforming a laboratory concept into a viable solution for preserving the records of human civilization."
Implementing the storage technology at scale could be a "milestone" in the history of knowledge storage, similar to oracle bones, medieval parchment, or the modern hard drive, they said.
"One day, a single piece of glass might carry the torch of human culture and knowledge across millennia," Chen and Wu said.