Data stored safely for ten thousand years (they speculated)

Saturday 28th February, 2026 - Bruce Sterling

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10042-w

(…)

Here, we present Silica, a comprehensive archival digital data storage technology built on femtosecond laser direct writing in glass. Our technology guarantees data integrity (stored data are retrieved without errors), and a storage system using this technology18 guarantees high data durability (data are not lost due to failures). Silica is the first glass-based data storage that meets all the requirements of a production storage system.

Our work advances the field because we consider all main system metrics defined in section ‘Key metrics’. Our comparison with known previous work4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,22 (Supplementary Information) shows that, to our knowledge, Silica is the first published storage technology using glass that performs across all these key storage metrics and is the first to demonstrate reliable operation across writing, reading and decoding.

Our work is based on several key innovations:…