Laser-etched glass aims to store data for millennia
Microsoft Cambridge researchers refined long-term data storage by encoding data as voxel patterns inside glass with a femtosecond laser. A 12 cm² piece of fused silica (~2 mm thick) can hold about 4.84 TB, read by automated microscopy and ML decoding, with write speed up to 65.9 million bits per second using four synchronized beams. The deformations are predicted to last over 10,000 years at room temperature, though the approach targets cloud-scale use rather than consumer devices due to cost and questions about future access to reading technology.