Is Pyrex glass the reply to long-term knowledge storage?

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Microsoft simply introduced a breakthrough in its push to commercialize Undertaking Silica, its effort to etch knowledge into glass as an archival medium: The corporate has efficiently made the etching approach work with the kind of glass utilized in oven doorways.

Beforehand, Undertaking Silica used a particular sort of fused glass, adequate for analysis work however not for bringing the Silica expertise to the mainstream. Now, Microsoft has made it work with borosilicate glass, the kind of glass present in Pyrex containers.

Silica in any other case stays the identical. The aim has at all times been to retailer knowledge “completely,” in a medium that gained’t degrade over time. Or near it, anyway: The said aim is to retailer knowledge for over 10,000 years, and the corporate has beforehand examined it by etching films like Superman into glass as a method to retailer them. An analogous check archived music for future generations, too.

In any other case, even “archival” storage media can endure from degradation. “Bit rot” can happen in every thing from onerous drives to recorded media like DVD-ROMs and rewritable optical media. Microsoft first experimented with encoding knowledge into DNA, after which moved to Silica in 2019. Undertaking Silica encodes knowledge holographically into glass simply 2mm thick, and nonetheless does — now, the glass getting used is way more commercially out there.

Whereas Microsoft mentioned that the analysis section of Silica is over, it didn’t point out that manufacturing would start. Microsoft mentioned in a weblog publish that it'll “contemplate learnings” from what it has found. Microsoft printed its ends in a brand new article in Nature.

Microsoft additionally added that it has made advances in truly writing the information. Fairly than use the polarization of the glass to encode the information, Microsoft can now use what it calls “section voxels” — utilizing the section change of the glass as a substitute. Many extra of those voxels can now be written in parallel, Microsoft added. If polarization voxels are used as a substitute, Microsoft mentioned that it had discovered a method to simplify the writing course of to only a pair of pulses.

Lastly, Microsoft mentioned that it had utilized machine studying to optimize image encodings, and to higher establish how knowledge might “age” throughout the glass.

After all, our descendants 10,000 years from now will want to have the ability to truly learn the information. Let’s hope that Silica glass doesn’t find yourself as some archival Zip drive from the twenty first century.