1,000-Year Digital Storage
July 22nd, 02009 by Robin Ward
If you’re among those concerned with data rot, you might see a glimmer of hope for long-term digital preservation in a recent development from Utah-based startup Millenniata. The company will soon begin manufacturing DVDs capable of protecting data that can be read for 1,000 years, if stored at room temperature.From Slashdot:
“Dubbed the Millennial Disk, it looks virtually identical to a regular DVD, but it’s special. Layers of hard, ‘persistent’ materials (the exact composition is a trade secret) are laid down on a plastic carrier, and digital information is literally carved in with an enhanced laser using the company’s Millennial Writer, a sort of beefed-up DVD burner. Once cut, the disk can be read by an ordinary DVD reader on your computer.”
Let’s hope the folks at Millenniata are working to ensure that the necessary data-reading technology will be around for the next 1,000 years. A Millennial DVD player would be a vast departure from the current crop of devices that barely last beyond their one-year warranties.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 9:12 am and is filed under Digital Dark Age, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted on July 22nd, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Interesting…thank you. If anything, Millenniata is getting ahead of the game as far as r&d for combating data rot…good on them.
Posted on July 28th, 2009 at 5:45 am
[...] and DVDs has a vanishingly short lifetime. But a Utah firm called Millenniata is, according to the Long Now Blog, about to begin offering DVDs that can protect their data for a thousand years. Capable of being [...]