Data storage in the digital age has changed the way we interact with the world. It is cheap, convenient, and fast. We snap thousands of pictures with no thought of developing costs. We can have terabytes of music and video stored (almost) literally in the palm of our hands. We rarely think about the possibility that all of our precious data can (and regularly does) go “POOF!” Digital storage is quick and easy, but is essentially simultaneously ephemeral and fragile.
As time goes on and the limits of storage capacity keep getting pushed, hard drives get more and more complex. The physics behind modern read-write heads and storage methods make today’s drives inherently more unstable than drives produced before about the turn of the century. This leads to more overall failures and more complex data recovery procedures when drives do fail.
This is a real issue that goes beyond the inconvenience of having to download all your iTunes again because your drive crashed. Long-term digital archiving is a field that companies are pouring money into, not only to save current data but also to preserve digital copies of paper records they may have destroyed thinking “Hey — we have it all on digital.” Simple is better for archiving; I have a box of snapshots going back many decades. Will my children be able to fire up my 2.5” external drive and look at their baby pictures in 30 years? It seems unlikely.
A European company has taken a new direction in data storage, and apparently they have made it work. EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL–EBI) has a working method to encode data on strings of DNA. Apparently they have encoded and decoded information already. DNA is a storage medium that has obviously stood the test of time — DNA “in the wild” seems to last a million years or so. That’s long enough for me.
Of course, the big issue will be making sure we have a machine to encode and decode the strings! I can’t help wondering what would happen if you could make proteins synthesize from strings of man-made data…like what would a movie or a song look like if you could have a machine make proteins out of the code? Or what would happen if you mixed “The Wizard of Oz” and “Apocalypse Now” together and tried to watch it? Martin Sheen hiding from flying monkeys in the rivers of Vietnam? The horror…
Anyway, here is the link to the article I saw on phys.org. Check it out!