French scientists suggest new extremely durable storage method

Did you know that popular 120 mm optical discs promise to keep your information for up to 100 years?

This may seem enough for most people as sadly pretty much all of them will be dead in a hundred years but for some tech people and scientists a hundred years just don’t cut it. This is why a team of French scientists has proposed a new technology that promises to keep your data for as long as 10 million years!

The new tech, which is still in early stage, is based on 200 mm sapphire discs that are covered on the inside with a thin layer of platinum. It is exactly the platinum coating that provides the longevity. As to information – it is stored as extremely small text pages that can be read by using a microscope only.

But what’s the goal of such long life discs? For one thing they may provide crucial information to future generations – for example where radioactive waste was stored.

The new technology is not free from drawbacks though. First one is pricing – a single disc costs EUR 25 000. Second, using human language to write information might mean that in the future the language may have become ancient or even extinct. Another problem is which language to use.

Despite the problems the new technology seems promising so it may even see wide use in a few decades.