Gigayear Storage?
- Hard Drive Lifetime: 1-30 years
- Optical Media Lifetime: 3-30 years
- Magnetic Tape Lifetime: 10-40 years
- Solid State Drive Lifetime: 3-50 years
(Averages of various sources)
Scary, isn’t it?
Here in the office, a quick poll shows we have seen consumer grade hard drives and CD-RWs fail in less than a year. So, storage lifetime is a real issue.
An optimistic new whitepaper says:
“If we want to preserve anything about the human race which can outlast the human race itself, we require a data storage medium designed to last for 1 million to 1 billion years.”
This paper checks into a medium made up of “tungsten encapsulated by siliconnitride which, according to elevated temperature tests, will last for well over the suggested time.”
A quick summary shows that we are looking at QR Codes in a highly heat resistant optical format readable by computers and microscopes (and depending on the amount of data, smartphones and cameras).
It’s an interesting article that can be found in its entirety here:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.2961v1.pdf