Archives live forever

• Autores: Hal Hodson
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3042, 2015, págs. 18-19
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Group 47 in Woodland Hills CA is working on ways to get around the fact that the 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.