One of the fallacies that you hear often is that "storing data digitally is not good for long-term data storage." The 10 to 100 gigabits of data per square inch on today’s memory cards has an estimated life expectancy of only 10 to 30 years.
Indeed, writing once to today's digital media is not a good long-term solution but that totally ignores the topics of data maintenance and data replication. Whatever the process, many people still believe that the only media that is suitable for long-term storage is paper and/or microfilm.
A new technology has been announced that should put an end to such beliefs.
Alex Zettl and his group at the University of California, Berkeley report that they have developed an experimental memory device with a storage capacity as high as 1 terabyte per square inch and the ability to store data in excess of one billion years.
That's right: a billion years. That should be long enough for most genealogy purposes!
The new technology creates a programmable memory system that, like a silicon chip, can record digital information and play it back using today's computer hardware storing data at a high density with a very long lifetime.
You can read more at http://www.physorg.com/news162061022.html.
