Microsoft Unveils 10,000-Year Glass Data Storage

Microsoft researchers have developed a breakthrough in long-term data storage, encoding vast amounts of information into ordinary glass using laser technology that could preserve it for more than 10,000 years. The advancement, part of the company's Project Silica initiative based in Cambridge, United Kingdom, was detailed in a recent paper published in the journal Nature.

The system addresses a growing challenge in the digital age: the rapid degradation of traditional storage media like hard disks and magnetic tapes, which often require frequent replacement to prevent data loss. As global data volumes explode from sources such as the internet, industrial sensors and scientific experiments, reliable archival solutions have become essential. Project Silica uses ultrafast femtosecond lasers, emitting pulses lasting quadrillionths of a second, to etch data into glass as tiny three-dimensional structures called voxels. These voxels represent bits of information, converted into symbols with added error-correction elements to minimize reading and writing mistakes.

To write data, the laser fires at up to 10 million pulses per second, creating deformations across hundreds of layers...