Long-Term Data Storage: Molecular Dyes that can Archive Data

Today it’s easy and cheap to store mega and gigabytes of photographs and documents to cloud storage repositories run by tech giants like Apple, Google, and Amazon. But where will your data be 10, 20, or 30 years out from now. Will those repositories still exist or be accessible? If or when the cloud storage repository you use shuts down, will the vendor help you transition your files and data to an alternative repository?

What about the data you saved to CDs, DVDs and floppy disk drives years ago. Does it still exist, and can it be recovered? Just finding the hardware to be able to read those older data storage formats may be difficult. And if you find a device which can read the format, will the data still be in tact? Data stored to floppies have lifetimes on the order of tens of years — after twenty years the data stored will begin to degrade.

While the lifetime of paper and parchment is transitory, it is considerably longer than most of the digital alternatives available today. As a result, scientists continually look for media that would reliably be able to store and retrieve data over the long term.

A recent example, is work done at Harvard into data storage based on novel chemical dyes.

Amit A. Nagarkar, research associate at Harvard, said that their group is researching polymeric materials which long-term data archival. Thier approach “could provide access to archival data storage at a low cost. It provides access to long-term data storage using existing commercial technologies—inkjet printing and fluorescence microscopy.”

Their method combines seven different flourescent dyes that are sprayed by an inkjet printer onto an epoxy surface. Later the data stored can be read with a microscope that detects the data from the wavelengths of light emitted by the dyes. The data can then be reinterpretted so that the original document, book, video, or image can be reconstructed.

In a demonstration of the technique, the researchers found that they were able to retrieve the data with 99.6 percent accuracy. About one megabyte of information was written to a 7.2×7.2 square millimeter surface.

The researchers said that more work is still needed to improve reliability and data density surface. Nagarkar said that “in the future, we will need to store large amounts of data as our society transitions to a digital society.”