From floppy disks to forever: Scientists discover new way to store data in glass

From floppy disks to USBs, keeping important historical or personal data safe is a constant technological challenge. But scientists have found a new storage solution that could last for more than 10,000 years: laser writing in glass, Euronews writes.

Despite the buzz around data centres and cloud storage, they rely on hard disks and magnetic tapes, which do have a certain lifespan and have to be replaced.

Researchers have suggested that storing data in glass, which could include scientific research papers or historical documents, may be a way to preserve data for future civilisations.

Scientists from Microsoft in Cambridge, United Kingdom, say they have now found a way to do that with a special laser.

The system works by using a special laser that can turn data, in the form of bits, into groups of symbols.

The laser produces tiny, ultra-precise bursts of light inside the glass. Each laser pulse slightly alters the glass at a specific point. These small changes are called deformations—essentially tiny pits or structural modifications in the glass. Each of these tiny changes is known as a voxel, which is like a three-dimensional “pixel.” A single piece of glass just two millimetres deep could store 4.84 terabytes of data, roughly the equivalent of about two million books.