Data Storage That Could Outlast the Human Race

Nerval's Lobster writes "Just in case you haven't been keeping up with the latest in five-dimensional digital data storage using femtocell-laser inscription, here's an update: it works. A team of researchers at the University of Southampton have demonstrated a way to record and retrieve as much as 360 terabytes of digital data onto a single disk of quartz glass in a way that can withstand temperatures of up to 1000 C and should keep the data stable and readable for up to a million years. 'It is thrilling to think that we have created the first document which will likely survive the human race,' said Peter Kazansky, professor of physical optoelectronics at the Univ. of Southampton's Optical Research Centre. 'This technology can secure the last evidence of civilization: all we've learnt will not be forgotten.' Leaving aside the question of how many Twitter posts and Facebook updates really need to be preserved longer than the human species, the technology appears to have tremendous potential for low-cost, long-term, high-volume archiving of enormous databanks. The quartz-glass technique relies on lasers pulsing one quadrillion times per second though a modulator that splits each pulse into 256 beams, generating a holographic image that is recorded on self-assembled nanostructures within a disk of fused-quartz glass. The data are stored in a five-dimensional matrix—the size and directional orientation of each nanostructured dot becomes dimensions four and five, in addition to the usual X, Y and Z axes that describe physical location. Files are written in three layers of dots, separated by five micrometers within a disk of quartz glass nicknamed 'Superman memory crystal' by researchers. (Hitachi has also been researching something similar.)"

Comments

Another "magic" storage tech. BS, as usual.

[gweihir]

Or rather completely irrelevant. Nothing to see here except a few people that want attention. The issue with long-term storage is _not_ how to preserve the bits. It is how to preserve Reading equipment and, even more difficult, software that can read the data stored and transform it into something the user can read.

Re:Another "magic" storage tech. BS, as usual.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. The concept of a post-apocalypse tribal society restoring mankinds' knowledge with femtocell lasers is hilarious.

Re:Another "magic" storage tech. BS, as usual.

[vikingpower]

Ah, you must be a data storage specialist, Sir. Probably you even have your own research lab doing R & D in exactly the direction these talented people work in, and you know all the relevant literature, went to the important conferences. Otherwise you would not, I trust, have emitted such a peremptory yet wise judgment ?

Re:Another "magic" storage tech. BS, as usual.

[maroberts]

I'm happy with DD (2D?), but prefer C myself.

Re:Another "magic" storage tech. BS, as usual.

[shia84]

Who cares about a post-apocalypse tribal society on a pre-modern tech stage trying to restore mankinds' knowledge?
Give them 10k more years and they'll manage to do it with femtocell lasers just fine. Or 50k years, it really doesn't matter, it simply shrinks compared to the idea that some cataclysm just wiped out all books accessible in the world, all professional knowledge, reading skills, parents-teaching-offspring, dozens of other information carrying media types (respectively it's usage knowledge) that would be around anyway etc. which could allow them to get up and running more quickly... but somehow left a few humans alive.

This storage type is not meant for a post-apocalypse tribal society restoring mankinds' knowledge. But some of us would be happy if the now often unreadable magnetic records from 70 years ago would have been stored on something more durable.

Re:Another "magic" storage tech. BS, as usual.

[Thanshin]

The concept of a post-apocalypse tribal society restoring mankinds' knowledge with femtocell lasers is hilarious.

Femtocell Sharks.

Re:Another "magic" storage tech. BS, as usual.

[DFurno2003]

He does have a 5 Digit id.

Re:Another "magic" storage tech. BS, as usual.

[somersault]

This is Slashdot. Please trim the redundant branches from your joke code in future to aid readability:

meme = find_matching_meme(post)

if (meme && meme.category == funny_meme)
        return funny
else
        return not_funny

Re:Another "magic" storage tech. BS, as usual.

[jythie]

Oh no! Not scientific research! How dare it not have immediate marketing applications!

Re:Another "magic" storage tech. BS, as usual.

[Smallpond]

But some of us would be happy if the now often unreadable magnetic records from 70 years ago would have been stored on something more durable.

Because those TPS reports will make great reading?

Re:Another "magic" storage tech. BS, as usual.

[Anonymous Coward]

While they might be doing boring materials science, they have to come up with lots of pie-in-the-sky ideas about what their research could potentially be used for, if somebody can ever get enough engineers together to figure out the pesky implementation details. Geeks around here have heard promise after promise about revolutionary storage technology that goes nowhere precisely because of this drastic overselling to grab research money.

We have gone from having a 3.5" surface that holds on average 1.4 million bytes or at most 2.8 million bytes - to a time where that same 3.5" of surface now holds upwards of 3 trillion bytes.

That is hardly "goes no where"

I for one am pretty thankful for our cheap and no less reliable 3 TB drives compared to the floppy disks of days past.

I remember starting out with 5.25" floppies that were still actually floppy on the outside, holding 80 KB per side (140 KB if you flip the thing over manually), as a technology replacing audio tape cassette with seek times that are in many ways laughable today.
There are others here who have lived with even older technologies and grew up very familiar with the storage problem on hardware I suspect you might not believe was ever as limited as it was.

Just because some scientists never realized their ideas does not mean the entire storage field has gone no where over the years or that no scientist ever has.

Re:Another "magic" storage tech. BS, as usual.

[shadowrat]

There is more to back up than technical knowledge. We've bypassed the technology of the mayans and other ancient supercultures (assuming you aren't buying into the ideas that they had alien tech and stuff), but we still have an interest in learning about them. I know slashdot is a crowd obsessed with tech over culture, but cultural knowledge is valuable. TFS jokes about it, but honestly, backing up facebook would probably be incredibly interesting to a future civilization.

In the distant future...

[BeerCat]

Archeologists find one of these pieces of quartz, and then (through a lifetime's study) work out that they are not just pretty baubles, but are actually data storage devices. The excitement builds. Whole teams of researchers devote their life to the task of decoding the message - after all, the Rosetta Stone gave a lot of incite into the ancients - and then finally, the day comes when someone has worked it all out:

99 crystals contain cat pictures

1 of them contains the instructions on how to build the reader

And, tucked into one small segment of one of the crystals, almost as an afterthought, the digitised Bodlean Library, and the Library of Congress. Pity that bit was a bit chipped...

Re:In the distant future...

[Issarlk]

You forgot the crystal containing the FBI warnings about piracy.

One Million Years Later

[Arancaytar]

"It has not been discovered what these disc-shaped glass objects were intended to symbolize, but it is now believed that they served either as ceremonial ornaments or a crude form of currency."

Re:One Million Years Later

[Anonymous Coward]

Other experts opinionated that since it's round it obviously represents a solar symbol or a related deity.
The disc was probably worn on the priest head or served as a mirror in certain rituals. The carvings on the box in which it was found clearly show a ray of light hitting the surface of the disc and the writings on the same box must also carry some sort of numerologist significance.

Pseudo-scientists claim that the level of machine work needed to produce such discs is close to our current space-age technology but independent experts have been unable to find proof for this, really fine sand seems to have been used.

Halfway there

[Arancaytar]

Now we just need to build a license server that will operate for a million years, so the DRM-encrypted data will still be readable.

Double your storage capacity!

[clickety6]

Apparently if you chip out a small square of quartz from the top edge, you can flip the disk over and store another 360 Terrabytes on the other side. The manaufacturers don't want you knowing this, of course, as they want to sell 720 TB stroage at a premium price.

Rosetta Disk

[handy_vandal]

See also Rosetta Disk:

The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation's 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.

The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’

On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).

The 13,000 pages in the collection contain documentation on over 1500 languages gathered from archives around the world. For each language we have several categories of data—descriptions of the speech community, maps of their location(s), and information on writing systems and literacy. We also collect grammatical information including descriptions of the sounds of the language, how words and larger linguistic structures like sentences are formed, a basic vocabulary list (known as a “Swadesh List”), and whenever possible, texts. Many of our texts are transcribed oral narratives. Others are translations such as the beginning chapters of the Book of Genesis or the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

Source: The Rosetta Project