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.[Clip]
But for David Rosenthal, who studies data storage at Stanford University in California, this kind of long-lasting medium is missing the point. He believes that we now live in an age where, if data isn’t online, it may as well not exist. DOTS isn’t designed to be searchable and easy to access, and for Rosenthal, that’s a problem.
Rosenthal is working on a way to preserve society’s data by networking many copies of it together. When one copy goes down, due to disc failure, human error or sabotage, the network can replenish that copy from another location.
Washington Times op-ed co-authored by Group 47 execs.
Filed under: Data Files, Funding, News, Preservation
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
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