The tiny glass blocks that can preserve your data for centuries

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It is not clear, concedes Black, senior principal research manager at Microsoft, Cambridge, that future generations will require a perfect-fidelity instantiation of MS Flight Sim. But it is clear that they will need a lot more storage, for longer — and, he argues, it will need to be a lot better than it currently is.

“There [are] vast and increasing amounts of data that people want to keep for long, archival time periods,” he said.

Some of it is our own personal data, such as photographs we want to access for our whole lives, and perhaps also for our children’s lives. Some is commercial data: movie studios, for instance, need ways to store films in perfect fidelity indefinitely. Some is medical: at the moment, pathology slides are normally kept only in their physical form because digital storage is too expensive. Some is governmental and legal. Many countries now have a requirement to keep public records essentially for ever.

Today, there are two choices for storing data long-term: hard drive or tape. DVDs, or similar optical technologies, have failed to gain popularity, partly because of their durability, partly because of the storage capacity per disc.

If you choose tape, it’s cheap but vulnerable to damage. If you choose a hard drive, you can access it faster but you need to cool it. In both cases, because magnetic memory degrades, every five to ten years archivists recommend copying it over to a new tape or hard drive. This means that some public records, kept secret under the 50-year rule, might live on half a dozen different media before they are even read.

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It is, said Black, clearly wasteful. “You buy and you copy, you buy and you copy, you buy and you copy.” It requires money, energy and effort, and if a step in the chain goes wrong everything is lost.

To solve this problem, researchers have considered a range of new storage technologies, from writing data in DNA to etching it on ceramics.

In a UK-based project, Microsoft has bet on glass. The project builds on a breakthrough made by scientists at the University of Southampton, who showed that it was possible to encode data in glass using lasers. Glass doesn’t care about heat or cold, wet or dry. It doesn’t deteriorate if you forget to pay your air conditioning bills. It can, said Black, “survive benign neglect”. Not to mention the less benign kind, such as malware and hacking.

Black has been scoping for customers, to understand the market. “Certain government agencies are very interested in any media immutable to outside influence,” he said. He turns the glass, and it catches the sun, going from transparent to blue as the etchings scatter and refract the light. “The same agencies are also interested in media not affected by electromagnetic interference.”

While the principle was invented at Southampton, making it work has required much more investment. To be useful the glass needed to store terabytes rather than megabytes. Reading it back, using microscopes, has to be quick and automated. So too does accessing the glass panes themselves.

This sort of storage will never replace the kind that powers, for instance, Google Drive. This is not where you store your office cloud documents that you are constantly working on and accessing (although archival storage is often where they themselves are backed up). But it still needs relatively rapid retrieval.

In Microsoft’s research facility in Cambridge, they have a mock-up of how they intend to do that. On shelves in the basement, robots zip between racks of glass, collecting and sorting them with brisk efficiency, like post-apocalyptic librarians.

Ant Rowstron, deputy director of the laboratory, said that they still don’t know how it will come to market. It may be that they simply introduce the glass on their cloud storage systems, without the consumer noticing. It may be that having a different storage medium will ultimately open up a new way of using storage and it becomes a different product.

“Once you’ve written your piece of glass, it really doesn’t cost me much to keep it,” he said. “I just take a little bit of shelf space and I can store an awful lot of stuff. I don’t need to worry about it. I don’t need to check it. I don’t need to cool it. I can just leave it there. And so suddenly there’s no value to deleting the data. So if you want to keep it, you can keep it.”

Then, if your great-great-great-grandchildren want to retrieve it, that is possible too. “If you give me data, we will store it and it will be there in 100 years’ time. It’ll be there in 500 years’ time.”