Report: Using Metal Tape to Store/Preserve Digital Data For the Future

From New Scientist:

Group 47 in Woodland Hills, California, is working on ways to get around the fact that our drives and discs have a limited lifespan. Instead of writing 1s and 0s as magnetic signals, they write them as microscopic dots onto metal tape, using a laser in a system called DOTS. The tape is then stored in cartridges. A high resolution digital camera can read the data back, but all a future human would need to retrieve the image is knowledge of binary code and a microscope. The firm says the tape should last hundreds of years without degrading and, crucially, doesn’t need any special climate-controlled storage.
The company received funding from a US intelligence agency last year to develop a prototype, and is now raising funds to build a commercial version. The medium is designed to guide someone with no knowledge of hard drives or computers to read its data – all 1.2 terabytes of it. “It’s just like the disc on the side of the Voyager spacecraft,” says Rob Hummel, Group 47’s president.

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Filed under: Data Files, Funding, News, Preservation