Microsoft develops ultra durable glass plates that can store several TBs of data for 10000 years::Project Silica’s coaster-size glass plates can store unaltered data for thousands of years, creating sustainable storage for the world

  • Arondeus@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Of all the stuff I’ve seen in sci fi movies and tv shows, I really didn’t think the computer chips on glowing transparent plates was gonna become reality. What a crazy world this is.

  • Yote.zip@pawb.social
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    1 year ago

    “Project Silica’s goal is to write data in a piece of glass and store it on a shelf until it is needed. Once written, the data inside the glass is impossible to change.”

    Very important note here.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      So it’s great for archival storage. This is exactly the type of thing I’m interested in if it was cheap enough.

            • Gabu@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Researcher in 10000 years: “Woah! You thought those ‘ancient greeks’ were weird? Look at this shit!”

        • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          My media collection. I really only need like 50 years tops. At which point I’ll be dead or to senile to enjoy it. Unless I can back up my own consciousness onto it. Then… That.

            • Arsecroft@lemmy.sdf.org
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              1 year ago

              Interesting replies but I’m just wondering what file format to use.

              ascii + markdown for text if you’re from the US

              Don’t we have troubles opening stuff from 4-5 os versions ago?

              Yeah, but that is because people want to make money and so make their file formats difficult to understand on purpose.

              Whatever creatures discover our mystical tablets will hopefully be far smarter than us, or they’ll use the sum of human knowledge to tile their bathrooms.

            • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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              1 year ago

              I don’t have anything I can’t open and I’ve got stuff from 20+ years ago. I don’t even have to go out of my way to have applications that are compatible with it. If I did run across something I would just build a VM with whatever software I needed to open it. Just have to keep in mind what software you’ll need and back that up as well.

    • Otakulad@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      True, but being very easy to make would hopefully keep costs down, allowing you to have multiple plates.

      Also, this may not be for home use but companies that need to store data for years.

        • OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          My great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandson is really gonna love this 36K remaster of Shrek. I know I would

          • tpfm@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Your great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great who?

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If the glass is nothing special, each piece would cost cents and be like burning CD’s back in the day, except infinitely recyclable.

      What’s more important is the time and cost to read and write.

    • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Backup wikipedia once a year to a crystal and then civilizations thousands of years from now can comb through it as they wish.

      • quackers@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        This… well roughly. People here say muh file formats etc. But you’re really going for the maximum lifetime, if its uncompressed text, it wouldn’t be too hard to reverse engineer if future people figure out that there’s data on there at all. The harder part may be extracting the data at all. We could also include instructions on how certain file formats can be read.

        It’s is is still a great long term archive storage, and more likely the data would be transfered to a better storage device within a few 100 years (if we’re talking about archiving the present for future archologists that is)

        • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          How amazing would it be if we came across some tomb that was just filled with thousands of scrolls detailing the whole history of Rome and Greece and all those other empires from the BC years?

  • ApeNo1@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Logs into the SilicaArk long term storage system for the first time.

    “Welcome Andy, would you like to use the optimistic theme or the pessimistic theme?”

    Chooses optimistic. Types in command to show storage capacity.

    “The glass is half full.”

  • anon_8675309@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Didn’t someone make a holographic cube some ten or so years ago with the same promises.

    I never get excited by this stuff. If I see it in Best Buy, then I’ll believe it.

  • MeekerThanBeaker@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Awesome. So Microsoft, does this mean I’ll finally get access to the other 3TB of OneDrive storage that I pay for on my family plan? Or do I still have to create random accounts that would simulate other family members in order to use it?

      • flop_leash_973@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        To be fair, I have a lot of stuff I am storing that I have no realistic reason to ever need or want to read again as it is.

      • jvisick@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Never read again? These can’t be modified, but they can be read. After all, it’d be pretty useless to store data on a medium than can never be read.

    • ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This plan it built under the assumption that more people will be using one drive. The value of scrapped data isn’t just quantity, but number of people.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    This is also the 10,000th time I’ve heard about this so there is that…

    • HMN@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      I almost literally yawned reading the title. “Journalists” regurgitating things they don’t understand and hyping them everytime like it’s the breakthrough of the century. I feel it waters down actual breakthroughs and makes people immune or at least apathetic to these stories because it’s the same thing over and over.

  • centof@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    It seems like it would make for a great replacement for Tape Backups that are currently used for long term storage. They are easy to write to but hard to read from and restore. It’ll probably be a great technology to put backups on especially if it lasts as long as they say. The challenge will probably come in with the specialized reading and writing laser / microscopes being expensive.

    • MrMcGasion@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      According to the article, they’re using their AI cloud service to decode the data, so it’s also likely so computationally expensive to decode that it won’t be practical. Seems more like a gimmick to woo investors that won’t actually ever see real world use, at least not any time soon. I suppose you could make the argument that you can back up data on it now, and hope reading it becomes more practical later, but then it’s more of a supplement to tape backup, rather than a replacement.

      • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        using their AI cloud service to decode the data

        The hell does that even mean? Is it a model that convinces people it’s decrypting data while taking guesses based on the training set?

        • WYLD_STALLYNS@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          My guess is it’s an attempt to build long term a subscription service model behind the idea. No subscription, equals it can’t be read or some contrived bs to leech more money out of users/governments of the encoding/decoding technology.

      • centof@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        There is certainly an element of this being PR for Microsoft. But it is worth considering that a huge amount of computing is done in large data centers.

        I think this fact could easily jump-start the use of a technology such as this. If it starts out where every large to mid-sized data center has a reader and writer shared among their thousands of customers it certainly would make it more viable.

        I would guess the AI service is MS’s way of trying to make sure they control the technology. Hopefully, it eventually can get replaced by a local AI model rather than MS’s proprietary AI.

  • generalpotato@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Was it minority report or the matrix that showed humans storing data on glass?

    Either way, this is pretty cool.

  • wason@lemmy.ninja
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    1 year ago

    So I read many times that it can store “several TBs of data” but how many exactly? 2, 3, 5, 10?

    Do they know exactly? Is it possible that they write 5 TBs and when they try to read it, they can only read like 3, losing the other 2 TBs?

    • knotthatone@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      They’re being so vague with the numbers that I really doubt how mature any of this is. Given some of the examples (photos, music, War & Peace) I’m guessing 3TB or so, but it’s a fluff article, so who knows.

    • elrik@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I imagine it would depend on the size of the plate and the degree to which correcting codes are used for redundancy.

    • Pyro@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Just out of curiosity, I calculated that the article’s (War and Peace * 875,000) claim would net you less than 1TB of storage space (~973GB), assuming it was GZipped (and ~3x that if not).

      The most concrete number we have is from another article (also on an official Microsoft page) that claims it’s upwards of 7TB.

    • figaro@lemdro.id
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      1 year ago

      Right? I had a similar question about this - what happens when it scratches?