Microsoft's glass storage system preserves data for thousands of years

Microsoft's glass storage system is now functional

Microsoft's Project Silica team has built a complete, functional archival data storage system that writes and reads data in glass using lasers. The system, detailed in a new paper in Nature, is designed to preserve data for potentially thousands of years, addressing the fragility of current long-term storage like hard drives and magnetic tape.

Current archival solutions are not built to last. Hard disks often fail within 5–10 years, and magnetic tapes degrade after about 30 years. The new system uses ultrafast laser pulses to inscribe data as 3D nanostructures inside a quartz glass platter, creating a far more durable medium.

How the glass storage system works

The process involves two key stages: writing and reading. To write data, a high-powered femtosecond laser creates microscopic voxels—essentially tiny 3D pixels—inside the glass. These voxels represent the binary data.

To read the data back, a lower-powered computer-controlled microscope scans the glass platter. An AI decoder then interprets the images from the microscope to reconstruct the original files. This separates it from past research, which often focused only on improving metrics like storage density.

• Writing: A femtosecond laser etches 3D voxels into glass.
• Reading: A microscope scans the platter, and AI decodes the images.
• Medium: Inert quartz glass, resistant to water, magnets, and extreme temperatures.

An end-to-end archival solution

The breakthrough is the creation of a full "write, store, read" pipeline. The team demonstrated the system's reliability by writing and accurately retrieving hundreds of megabytes of data, including the 2022 film Superman. This proves it's more than a lab experiment.

The system is designed for the cloud archive tier, where data is written once and rarely accessed. It is not meant for fast, frequent use like a desktop hard drive. Its value is in permanence for culturally or legally significant data that must survive for centuries.

The challenge of moving from lab to data center

While functional, scaling this technology for commercial use presents hurdles. The current write speed is slow, and the system requires precise, bulky optical equipment for reading. Integrating this robotics-heavy system into existing data center workflows is a major engineering challenge.

Microsoft has been working on Project Silica for years, partnering with Warner Bros. for tests. The new paper shows critical progress toward a real product. The goal is a library where robotic arms fetch glass platters and deliver them to readers, all managed by software.

The promise is a future where vital human knowledge isn't trapped on decaying magnetic media. If the scaling challenges are met, we could one day store our collective history in a material as enduring as stone, but with the density of the digital age.