Archiving

Microsoft has been perfecting a high-density storage technology that uses glass and ensures it stays intact for millennia. A breakthrough in how it writes data allows for the use of cheaply available borosilicate glass.

10,000 years in the future, explorers could end up getting rickrolled, thanks to a Global Music Vault due to be built in Norway. It features Microsoft’s Project Silica, a tough new data storage medium that’s never gonna give you up.

Storing the world’s knowledge digitally online makes it vulnerable to being lost in a disaster. As a backup, GitHub has now archived 21 TB of public open source data and buried it in a vault in the Arctic in an effort to preserve it for 1,000 years.