Photographs fade, books rot, and even hard drives eventually fester. When you take the long view, preserving humanity’s collective culture isn’t a marathon, it’s a relay — with successive generations passing on information from one slowly failing storage medium to the next. However, this could change. Scientists from the University of Southampton in the U.K. have created a new data format that encodes information in tiny nanostructures in glass. A standard-sized disc can store around 360 terabytes of data, with an estimated lifespan of up to 13.8 billion years, even at temperatures of 190°C. That’s as old as the universe, and more than three times the age of the Earth.
Source: ‘Five-Dimensional’ Glass Discs Can Store Data for 13.8 Billion Years | Re/code