Storing Data For the Next 1,000 Years

An anonymous reader writes "This may be an interesting take on creating long-term storage technologies. A team of researchers at UCSC claims to have come up with a power-efficient, scalable way to reliably store data for a theoretical 1,400 years with regular hard drives. TG Daily has an article describing this technology and it sounds intriguing as it uses self-contained but networked storage units. It looks like a complicated solution, but the approach is manageable and may be an effective solution to preserve your data for decades and possibly centuries." Nice to see research on this using the kinds of real-world figures for disk lifetimes that recent studies have been turning up.

Comments

Assuming I'm understanding this right...

[grasshoppa]

Let's look at some numbers
A 10 PB storage system could be built for about $4700 with an annual operational cost (power for running and cooling the system) of about $50.

Ya, 10 PETA BYTES for 4700 bucks? I don't think so. And an annual operating cost of 50 bucks, that includes power and cooling? Again, no. Now, let's focus on the administrative overhead of replacing disks and failed system. The larger the setup, the more administrative work there would be.

The rest of the idea has merit, but it almost seems to be that they are trying to compare apples to oranges with their comparison to tape. Tape's appeal is that it is long term storage that requires little maintenance. The same can't be said for this.