{"id":235981,"date":"2026-02-19T15:52:30","date_gmt":"2026-02-19T11:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/?p=235981"},"modified":"2026-02-19T16:53:35","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T12:53:35","slug":"from-floppy-disks-to-forever-scientists-discover-new-way-to-store-data-in-glass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/news\/235981\/","title":{"rendered":"From floppy disks to forever: Scientists discover new way to store data in glass"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/a> writes.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Researchers have suggested that storing data in glass, which could include scientific research papers or historical documents, may be a way to preserve data for future civilisations.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

Scientists from Microsoft in Cambridge, United Kingdom, say they have now found a way to do that with a special laser.<\/p>\n

The system works by using a special laser that can turn data, in the form of bits, into groups of symbols.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":235973,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,43,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-world","category-science"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235981"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":235991,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235981\/revisions\/235991"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}