Microsoft's glass data storage could preserve information for over 10,000 years

Data centres could store information in glass for thousands of years

An automated system for storing large amounts of information in glass could change the future of data centres. Our world runs on data, from the internet and readouts of countless industrial sensors to scientific data from particle colliders, and all of it must be stored safely and efficiently. In 2014, Peter Kazansky at the University of Southampton in the UK and his colleagues showed that lasers can be used to encode hundreds of terabytes of data into nanostructures inside glass, thus creating a data storage method that could last longer than the age of the universe. Their method was too impractical to be scaled up to industrial size, but Richard Black and his colleagues at Microsoft's Project Silica have now demonstrated a similar glass-based technology that might lead to long-lasting glass data libraries in the near future. "Glass can withstand extreme temperatures, humidity, particulates and electromagnetic fields. On top of that, glass has a great lifespan and doesn't require replacing every couple of years. That makes it a more sustainable medium as well. It requires very little energy to make and it's easy to recycle when we're done with it," says Black. The team's process starts by using femtosecond lasers, which emit light pulses lasting quadrillionths of a second, to convert data into tiny structures etched into thin glass layers. When turning bits of data into these structures, the team also added extra bits that ensured fewer reading and writing errors. The data could be read with a combination of a microscope and a camera, whose images were then passed to a neural network algorithm that converted the information back into bits. The whole process was easily repeatable and automated, making a case for robotically operated data facilities. The researchers managed to store 4.8 terabytes of data in a square piece of glass 120 millimetres wide and 2 millimetres thick - equivalent to roughly 37 iPhones' worth of storage in about a third of the volume of one. Based on accelerated ageing experiments, such as heating the glass in a furnace, the team estimated that data could remain stable and readable for more than 10,000 years at 290°C and even longer at room temperature. Additionally, the researchers tested their method with borosilicate glass, which is cheaper than standard glass, but could only accommodate less complex data. Kazansky says the main breakthrough of Project Silica is that it offers an end-to-end system that could be scaled up to the level of data centres. The physics principles behind glass-based data storage have been known for more than a decade, but the new work confirms that it can be turned into a viable technology, he says. Microsoft isn't the only firm interested in pushing this technology towards the mainstream. Kazansky co-founded a company called SPhotonix that has, for example, stored the human genome in a piece of glass. An Austrian start-up called Cerabyte similarly offers to store large amounts of data in ultra-thin layers of ceramic and glass. Still, questions remain, for instance, about the cost of integrating glass libraries into existing data centres and whether the Project Silica team can increase the capacity of its glasses, which ought to reach up to 360 terabytes based on the work of Kazansky's team. Black says the clearest potential applications for Project Silica's technology right now are anywhere data must survive for centuries, such as national libraries, scientific repositories or cultural records. Working with companies such as Warner Bros. and the Global Music Vault, his team has also begun to explore storing data that is meant to be kept indefinitely and currently resides in the cloud, he says. Kazansky says that the technology was even featured in the film Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, where the protagonist found it capacious and safe enough to trap a villainous artificial intelligence. "It is a rare moment where Hollywood's sci-fi is actually based on our peer-reviewed reality," he says.

Laser-etched glass can store data for millennia, Microsoft says

Paris (France) (AFP) - Thousands of years from now, what will remain of our digital era? The ever-growing vastness of human knowledge is no longer stored in libraries, but on hard drives that struggle to last decades, let alone millennia. However, information written into glass by lasers could allow data to be preserved 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, in a throwback to 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 centres, which use fast-degrading hard drives and magnetic tapes that require backing up every few years. In the journal Nature, Microsoft's research arm said Silica was the first glass storage technology that had been demonstrated to be reliable for writing, reading and decoding data. However, experts not involved in the project warned that this new tech still faces numerous challenges. How to write inside glass First, bits of data are turned into symbols, which correspond to three-dimensional pixels called voxels. A high-powered laser pulse then inscribes these minuscule voxels into square glass plates that are roughly the size of a CD. "The symbols are written layer by layer, from the bottom up, to fill the full thickness of the glass," the study explained. To read the data requires a special microscope that can see each layer, then decode the information using an algorithm powered by artificial intelligence. The Microsoft researchers estimated that the glass could survive for more than 10,000 years at a blistering 290 degrees Celsius, which suggests the data could last even longer at room temperature. However, the researchers did not look into what happened when the glass was deliberately smashed -- or corroded by chemicals. Unlike data centres, the glass does not require a climate-controlled environment, which would save energy. Another advantage is that the glass plates cannot be hacked or otherwise altered. The Microsoft researchers emphasised that future storage is important because the amount of data being produced by humanity is now doubling roughly every three years. 'Carry the torch ' One of the glass plates holds the equivalent of "about two million printed books or 5,000 ultra-high-definition 4K films", according to Feng Chen and Bo Wu, researchers at Shandong University in China not involved in the study. In a separate Nature article, the pair warned there were more challenges ahead, including finding a way to write the data faster, to mass produce the plates and to ensure people can easily access and read the information. However, they praised Silica for creating a "viable solution for preserving the records of human civilisation". "If implemented at scale, it could represent a milestone in the history of knowledge storage, akin 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."