Microsoft boffins cook up archival storage using Pyrex glass they say can last over 10,000 years

Microsoft this week detailed new research aimed at preserving data in borosilicate glass plates for thousands of years longer than conventional media like hard drives or magnetic tape, without needing to worry about bit rot.

The boffins at Redmond have been exploring this concept as part of Project Silica since 2019, using femtosecond lasers to encode data as voxels (3D pixels) inside glass.

Glass is resilient to water, heat, and dust. It also breaks down more slowly than the plastics or mechanical components found in hard disks or magnetic tape drives, both still widely deployed for archive storage media.

Up until recently, Microsoft's experiments into glass-based storage have required special fused silica glass, which is both challenging and expensive to manufacture. In a paper published in the journal Nature this week, Microsoft researchers now say these long-term storage qualities can be achieved using the same kind of borosilicate glass ...