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Encrypted DNA Storage Investigated by DOE Researchers (darkreading.com)
Biological engineers at a Department of Energy lab "are experimenting with encrypted DNA storage for archival applications." Slashdot reader ancientribe shares an article from Dark Reading:
Using this method, the researchers could theoretically store 2.2 petabytes of information in one gram of DNA. That's 200 times the printed material at the Library of Congress... Instead of needing a 15,000 square-foot building to store 35,000 boxes of inactive records and archival documents, Sandia National Laboratories can potentially store information on much less paper, in powder form, in test tubes or petri dishes, or even as a bacterial cell... "Hard drives fail and very often the data can't be recovered," explains Bachand. "With DNA, it's possible to recover strands that are 10,000 to 20,000 years old... even if someone sneezes and the powder is lost, it's possible to recover all the information by just recovering one DNA molecule."
You'd need robust error detection and correction because of mutation and damage.
We already have that. There are a few billion years of prior art.
But copying seems trivial.
The hard part is writing the device driver to interface the ribosome to /dev/dna.
I think mutation isn't really that much of an issue if the DNA isn't actually doing anything (being duplicated or transcribed to RNA).
It's supposed to be one of the more stable ways of storing data, much better than tape in fact. What I'd be more worried about is reading it again - current ways of reading DNA can misread it and have problems with long sequences of the same base pair, so some kind of an encoding to avoid those would be needed.
Is the potential of Quartz Glass Storage for archive not better http://themindunleashed.org/2014/02/data-storage-crystal-quartz-will-change-everything.html Stable for longer won't get eaten by bacteria