Stone, parchment or laser-written glass? Scientists find new way to preserve data

Microsoft Research’s Project Silica encodes data as laser-written voxels in glass to deliver highly durable, high-density archival storage that could last for millennia; the system reports 65.9 Mbit/s write rates and up to 4.84 TB in a small fused silica slab, with fully automated writing, reading via microscopy, and ML-based decoding, targeting cloud-scale deployments. Experts note benefits of inert, low-maintenance media but flag risks around future readability, significant scaling investment, and current economic headwinds.