Long Term Data Storage

July 11, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin

I ran across a thread on Slashdot (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/11/217218&from=rss) about the collection of glass photographic plates that is stored at the observatory at Harvard. It’s apparently about 25 percent worth of all the world’s currently existing photographic plates. There are over half a million of them covering the sky of both hemispheres with images from the past century. Definitely sounds like some very important history is stored in these photos, and they’re considering digitizing them for long term storage.

The problem is how to store the data for the long term. I don’t know about the best way to store glass photographic plates, but I’m not certain that anyone has come up with viable long term digital storage. It’s estimated that the total amount of data contained within these photos is a petabyte. That’s an enormous amount of data even by today’s standards. 1000 gigabytes is a terabyte. 1000 terabytes is a petabyte. There is a fascinating article at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte) about the petabyte.

I can certainly picture vast arrays of hard drives or stacks of optical discs, but for long term storage? Hard drives are prone to failure (although I do seem to have some ancient drives that still do the job), and today’s optical discs degrade in merely a few years. So what can we do to store information that is historical in nature? Hard copy? Back up data onto fresh devices every few years? I don’t have the answer. Hopefully someday someone will come up with the answer so we don’t lose things like books from the beginning of printing and these photos of the night sky.

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