‘BILLION-YEAR DISK’ to help FUTURE LIFEFORMS study us

Quick guide to disaster recovery in the cloud

Boffins have devised a storage medium that could hold data for up to one billion years and claim recent accelerated ageing tests have shown "million-year" survivability.

The study's authors are Jeroen de Vries of the University of Twente MESA and Institute for Nanotechnology, and colleagues Dimitri Schellenberg, Leon Abelmann1, Andreas Manz and Miko Elwenspoek.

Their paper (PDF), in pre-print in ArXiv, is titled "Towards Gigayear Storage Using a Silicon-Nitride/Tungsten Based Medium".

Its abstract states: "If we want to preserve anything about the human race which can outlast the human race itself, we require a data storage medium designed to last for 1 million to 1 billion years."

Well, yes, er ... back to the technology.

The authors, involved with The Human Document Project, write: "To ensure that knowledge about human life is available for many future generations or even future lifeforms we require a form of data storage suitable for storage at extreme timescales."

The storage medium is "tungsten encapsulated by silicon nitride which, according to elevated temperature tests, will last for well over the suggested time."

Current 4TB hard drives can store data for about 10 years before the content starts decaying, the authors say. Tape will last a few decades and archival paper could last 500 years with the right environment.

The study's authors write: "A new type of storage medium is required where the longevity of the data is more important than the storage density," and this WORM-type medium should last for one million to one billion years with stored data being readable using electro-magnetic waves:

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'BILLION-YEAR DISK' to help FUTURE LIFEFORMS study us