10,000 years sounds like a good benchmark and isn't as obviously ridiculous as saying a million years at 260°C
Blu-ray (1×) ~36 Mbit/s
MS-Glass (single beam) ~25.6 Mbit/s
MS-Glass (multi-beam) ~65.9 Mbit/s
Definitely. If it actually achieves those speeds it's perfectly reasonable for long-term/cold storage.
Will it run on Linux ?
> The authors of the paper have filed several patents relating to the subject matter contained in this paper in the name of Microsoft Corporation.
Page 12 of the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10042-w.pdf
It's whether Microsoft will be fair and flexible licensing their patents to third-parties.
Otherwise I'd suggest that if they keep it all to themselves and charge like a wounded bull, uptake would be quite limited.
At least until the original patents expires, which might be the better strategic move for third-parties in light of a hostile Microsoft given how long this archival format is expected to last.
I think we should stick to proven solutions for millennia-robust information storage and paint it on walls inside pyramids.
So a rough estimate, at the size of UMD, used in Playstation Portable, slightly smaller than the size of Mini Disc, it could store 1TB.
I assume we could do double layer in the future for 2TB.
For comparison that is roughly 1000x times the capacity of UMD. I would love to have this. Burn a few of these as backup and call it a day.
Wheres my futuristic storage guys?
A) record (a representative cross-section of) "everything" and leave multiple copies where future archeologists might find it. To avoid things like how present-day archaeologists apparently have holes in the kinds of things they can find, due to different social classes not leaving equally-robust trails.
B) this is "at least as long as I could possibly care about" storage. If I need to retain say financial records for seven years, and then later the government retroactively increases that to 20 years, there's no need to re-archive it all onto new media.
In many countries this "maximum (6 or) 7 years" for financial records is only if the local IRS decides that you're not potentially committing fraud. If they decide you've potentially committed fraud at any time in the past, there's no limit as to how far they can go. Even in the US stuff like (some of the) funds stolen by the Enron scam have been successfully clawed back more than two decades after the fact.
At least that's the case in several EU countries: there's literally no limit if the country's IRS equivalent decides you're potentially committing fraud (or if you did in the past).
Which is insane and totally arbitrary but that's how it is.
In addition to that under a great many KYC/AML excuses, there are banks out there that shall have zero issue asking you to justify the "source of funds" and at times I've had to provide info dating from way more than seven years in the past. I've heard --and I'm not shitting you-- from someone proving he bought for about 5 K EUR of something that went up more than 100x (think Bitcoin or some exceptionally successful stock), that his bank answered something like: "OK, but now that you've proven you actually made 100x, prove us the source of the 5 K EUR in 2013!".
That's what happens to a society when you give too much power to petty people.
There are literally collaborationists out there that are going to fill SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports) when someone can prove he turned 5 K into 500 K not on the 500 K (which are impossible to dispute) but on the 5 K that were used in the first place. That's how jealous and incompetent some people are in this world.
Things became so bad that I now have a Git versioned repo (and backups everywhere) where I keep track of, among other, every single wire transfer above 10 K EUR. I've got stuff dating back to 2001 when I bought my first apartment etc.
Don't underestimate how pathetic and bitter some of the people you'll have to deal with (be it from your local IRS or a bank) are going to be.
Now, can someone please help me get some data of this Iomega ZIPdrive disc?
gnabgib•2d ago