Thousands years from now, what will our digital age hold?
The ever-expanding vastness of human knowledge is no longer stored in libraries, but on hard drives that struggle to last for decades, even millennia.
However, information written into glass by lasers can preserve data for more than 10,000 years, Microsoft announced in a study on Wednesday.
Since 2019, Microsoft’s Silica Project has been trying to encode data on glass plates, reminiscent of the early days of photography, when negatives were also stored on glass.
The system uses silica glass, a common material that is resistant to changes in temperature, moisture and electromagnetic interference.
These are all problems for energy-hungry data centers, which use rapidly degrading hard drives and magnetic tapes that require backups every few years.
In the journal Nature, Microsoft’s research arm said that silica was the first glass storage technology that was shown to be reliable for writing, reading and decoding data.
However, experts not involved in the project warned that this new technology still faces many challenges.