Most cultural institutions and research laboratories still rely on magnetic tape to archive their collections. Hitachi recently announced that it has developed a medium that can outlast not only this old-school format but also CDs, DVDs, hard drives and MP3s.

The electronics giant partnered with Kyoto University's Kiyotaka Miura to develop “semiperpetual” slivers of quartz glass that Hitachi says can preserve information for hundreds of millions of years with virtually no degradation.

The prototype is made of a square of quartz two centimeters wide and two millimeters thick. It houses four layers of dots that are created with a femtosecond laser, which produces extremely short pulses of light. The dots represent information in binary form, a standard that should be comprehensible even in the distant future and can be read with a basic optical microscope. Because the layers are embedded, surface erosion would not affect them.

The medium has a storage density slightly better than that of a CD. Additional layers could be added, which would increase the density. But the medium is more remarkable for its durability. It is waterproof and resistant to chemicals and weathering, and it was undamaged when exposed to 1,000-degree heat for two hours in a test. The results of that experiment led Hitachi to conclude that the quartz data could last hundreds of eons.

“If both readers and writers can be produced at a reasonable price, this has the potential to greatly change archival storage systems,” says Ethan Miller, director for the Center for Research in Intelligent Storage at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The medium could be ideal for safekeeping a civilization's most vital information, museum holdings or sacred texts. The question is whether the world as we know it would even last that long. “Pangaea broke up less than several hundred million years ago,” Miller adds. “Many quartz-based rocks from that time are now sand on our beaches—how would this quartz medium fare any differently?”

This article was originally published with the title Super Long-Term Storage.

17 Comments

1. 1. RSchmidt 11:34 AM 1/6/13

   "guess I'll have to buy the White Album again" - Jay, MIB.

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2. 2. Dragonskinner1000 01:10 PM 1/6/13

   An apocryphal description of the tablets of the Ten Commandments and the ancient Sumerian "Tablet of Destinies" stated that they were made of a "lapis-colored glass". Hmmm... Neolithic data storage!

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3. 3. N49th 02:41 PM 1/6/13

   300 Million Years? Gee, either scientificamerican has to start hiring editors or fire their headline writers - now.

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4. 4. cbung 04:53 PM 1/6/13

   Bury them on a moon somewhere - in a big black monolith.

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5. 5. way2ec 05:48 PM 1/6/13

   I love the egos involved. What data will be relevant to "humans" even a million years from now? Sacred texts? Will we even be the same species in a million years let alone a hundred million years? I can imagine the debates, we did NOT evolve from humans. Creationists record that the Earth was created in six days 6000 years ago to be stored in a quartz crystal for millions of years, yeah right. They "store" the crystal in Los Angeles but with the movement of the San Andreas Fault it ends up off the coast of San Francisco. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, and quartz crystals turned to sand. The descendants of dolphins have returned to the land and make sand castles with pieces containing data that say we were created in the image of God, complete with beards, an appendix, and no female deity, so in whose image were females created. Oh wait, the end of the world will have come and God in his infinite wisdom nukes all the crystals, Sodom and Gomorrah style, leaving only the King James' edition of the Bible embedded in a fragment in the Garden of Eden.

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6. 6. N49th 08:27 PM 1/6/13

   way2sec, good reprose but if I may ask which King James are you referring to. Afterall there are two versions.
   Welcome to politics. Cheers.

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7. 7. N49th 08:44 PM 1/6/13

   I have a stent in my heart. There is a robot roaming Mars. ScientificAmerican, without getting snotty, explain both. I'll buy the crayons.

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8. 8. waterbrother 04:45 AM 1/7/13

   "... CDs, DVDs, hard drives and MP3s." You're mixing apples and oranges here. MP3 is not a storage medium - maybe you should change that to flash memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory).
   Cheers.

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9. 9. BillR 01:33 PM 1/7/13

   I wonder... Has any analysis of these "Crystal Skulls" been done to try to detect anything that would indicate possible data storage? The "holes" may be much smaller than those made during these experiments. But then again, you would need some way to translate the information into a currently understood language. Considering the number of different alphabets, hieroglyphs, and pictographs we know of, that would be an almost impossible undertaking.
   The reverse is true as well. How would we ensure that the entities (maybe human) who found this data would be able to read it and understand it?

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10. 10. Steve D in reply to way2ec 04:43 PM 1/7/13

    The point is that the data will be immune to most of the things that can corrupt data now: power surges, scratches, EMP, etc. The density of a CD isn't all that good by the standards of my mini-hard drive, but if we put all our great works on multiple copies of these quartz plates, we can be confident of never losing them for as long as we have reason to access them. If we can get 1Gb per cubic centimeter, we can get a terabyte in a cube 10cm on a side and a petabyte per cubic meter. But whatever coding we use has to be transparent. Given the stakes, why not a low-res directly readable coding for text instead of ASCII? These days, file size isn't much of a stumbling block. Every image stored needs to have a decoding algorithm stored with it.

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11. 11. Daniel.Berglund 06:08 PM 1/7/13

    Your reporter needs some scientific training. MP3's are not a storage medium, they are a data format. Also, you misinterpreted the quote at the bottom to mean the opposite of what was actually said.

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12. 12. way2ec in reply to Steve D 02:01 AM 1/8/13

    You make a good point, the desire for data storage that will last for as long as WE might want it. I can imagine that timeline to be hundreds and maybe thousands of years. Wouldn't it be amazing if we had access to the meanings of the cave paintings made some 20-30,000 years ago. To take the data forward millions of years creates some problems for me, not the least of which is the idea that we won't be "humans" anymore. Maybe I should look beyond our "sacred texts" and imagine DNA codes in the crystals so that the life forms that we are forcing into extinction could be brought back, a Noah's Ark or Gaia's Garden in the form of a crystal.

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13. 13. stevewriter 08:04 AM 1/9/13

    Data storage is a matter of structure preservation in an energy environment. The oldest known data storage structures in the Earth's energy environment are granitic gneiss and other ancient rock in the four billion year age range that were part of deep batholithic structures and have gradually appeared at the surface due to uplift and erosion. These structures do not store reruns of "I Love Lucy," but geologists often pry data from them to determine the age of the earth and other bits of information from the distant past.
    
    On Earth we also have an example of a dynamical storage system in the range of 3.5 billion years of retained information. This system accommodates the energy levels present on the surface of our planet quite well and has been able to retain essential kinds of information through replication and clerical function. We know these as living structures which have retained the kinds of informational order needed to auto-reproduction and auto-repair from the dawn of life.
    
    If humans really want to make data last a long time, the best bet is to get it out of the high energy environment of Earth. If nothing collides with Voyager, the order it contains can last indefinitely because deep space is such a low energy environment. Multiple units fired in various directions could give the data a chance of lasting longer than the solar system. It might make entertaining reading for the gods of the future.

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14. 14. jtdwyer 03:37 PM 1/9/13

    Yes, the technical issues is that other data storage media limits the potential retention of data. It'd have been nice to have the Library of Alexandria on the web...
    
    However, while data can be represented in binary format and read using optical microscopes, that assumes that no one forget the encoding scheme used (such as ASCII binary encoding) or the format of numerical data representation (ASCII, ordered binary, packed decimal, etc.) - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness
    
    Moreover, what does that 4 byte binary number in the 34th position represent - customer age or street number? Do all future versions of MicroSoft Word support Word 97-2003 format files? When we're using MP-27 format files will our software have forgotten MP-3? Not only the ability to physically read binary data is required, but knowledge of data encoding schemes and peculiar data and file formats are necessary to make use of data.
    
    This of course presumes that some future folks won't melt down these nice slivers of glass to make real windows out of them...

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15. 15. cnemeroff in reply to way2ec 10:24 PM 1/9/13

    What makes you think this hasn't already happened? Maybe more than once? Seriously?

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16. 16. verdai 04:12 PM 1/17/13

    for what it looks like, that must be wonderful.
    and will it record sound, and pictures, as well as text?

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17. 17. farmrchrys 09:40 AM 4/29/13

    I like this idea of resilient archival data storage. Call me old-fashioned, but I still think it's possible for humans to have a future, and I'd like my great-great-great grand children to marvel at images of my family the way I was able to marvel at the photographs of my ancestors because my family has kept images since the Daguerreotype days. What I can't understand is why no company has released a tempered glass version of the standard CD that, for an extra cost, could be an option for archival data storage available to today's masses.

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