Storage: Engineering Storage Media to last for Millenium

The history of humans spans backwards in time only a few thousand years and our records about how human ancestors lived beyond more than a few hundred years ago is relatively scant.  While we have an increasingly wide variety of technologies to capture, record, and document our lives and culture today, our storage technologies rapidly are obsoleted, and the media that we use for storage often lasts no more than a decade or two.

In order to ensure that our knowledge and culture can be documented and stored over long periods of time, scientists are using nano-technology and other techniques to develop storage media that should be able to endure the test of time.   The Rosetta Project proposed by the Long Now Foundation promotes investigation in order to develop materials and methods for storing information longer than 10,000 years.

Scientists from the University of Twente in the Netherlands say that they’ve now developed a disk that is expected to be able to last for at least a million years.

Jeroen de Vries and the group of researchers at Twente created a storage unit that requires a high amount of energy before ‘bit rot’ of the stored data can occur.  Their test device was a wafer made of tungsten encapsulated with silicon nitride.  Tungsten is able to withstand extreme temperatures.  A two-dimensional QR code was etched on the wafer with large pixels, and each pixel of the large overall QR code in turn contained smaller QR codes with information.

deVries said that “One scenario is that a disaster has devastated the earth and society must rebuild the world.  Another scenario could be that we create a kind of legacy for future intelligent life that evolves on Earth or comes from other worlds. You must then think about archival storage of between one million and one billion years.  In principle, we can store everything on the disc that we believe is worthwhile saving: for example, a digital image of the Mona Lisa.”

Another group at the University of Southampton developed what they are calling a 5D ‘Superman memory’ crystal for potentially unlimited lifetime data storage.  The media used is based on nanostructured glass.  Data can be stored and retrieved on the media using femtosecond laser writing.  The group claims the device can have a disk capacity of 360 terabytes and can withstand temperatures up to 1000°C.

Jingyu Zhang, lead researcher at the University of Southampton project, said that “we are developing a very stable and safe form of portable memory using glass, which could be highly useful for organisations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan.  Museums who want to preserve information or places like the national archives where they have huge numbers of documents, would really benefit.”

Professor Peter Kazansky of the Optoelectronics Research Center, said that “it is thrilling to think that we have created the first document that will likely survive the human race.  This technology can secure the last evidence of civilization: all we’ve learnt will not be forgotten.”