Is this being actively used outside of Microsoft? I remember reading that the film industry has groups who do effectively nothing but copy films from one storage technology to another because of the size of their archives means there is always something stored on too-old media.

My favorite head slapping dumb part about Microsoft’s Silica is the goofy little robots that are the only means to find unlabeled, unadorned identical glass slabs. No human readable filing system, no cartridge to protect the 7TB slab from falling and breaking. Just a goofy awkward robot that will certainly be robust for, what was the number, 10,000 years?

I wish we could have something for ProSumer. Right now it is still NAS with ZFS / BTRFS, scrub, and replacing it every 5 years. And it is still quite expensive. ( Not to mention big / bulky ). And the most important thing is that I own the data, not another storage inside the "Cloud".

Remember the times when the biggest disks were up to ~100GB and LTO tape could store 1.6TB (compressed, 800GB uncompressed)? That's 8 biggest hdds. And now? We have spinning hdds bigger than the biggest lto standard. Where is my 160TB lto tape?

It is sad there is no removable media other than maybe these few TB portable ssds that can be used for archival purposes. I _still_ have my commodore 64 datasette tapes as well as floppies from the start of the pc era(for me).

Even for the prosumer there were iomega drives. Now, one is supposed to use (and trust in) the cloud. Bonkers.

>Where is my 160TB lto tape?

Exactly! Or where is the affordable 1-5 TB Tape?!

And worst of all SSD is not reliable. And apart from an over supply market where prices have fallen to record low we are at right now. NAND cost wont be dropping much in the near future.

Apart from big Enterprise, most smaller shops dont know and cant afford to do storage / backups.

I'm surprised we don't have OTP SD cards. Wouldn't that be good for a few hundred years in theory?

> Long-term archival storage is going to be an important industry as our data volumes grow.

Unless you care about reading your data, as then it won't be important. Let me know when tape starts taking more of the global storage market share. It's a super mature, functional, and far higher performance storage media, and it's total percentage of global bytes shipped dwindle.

I assume glass storage would degrade under radiation which is why they want to use nickel on the moon. Silica is cool for earth though.

Isn't the moon slated to [on an extremely long-term basis, not quite red-dwarfed-Sun timeline] eventually escape Earth's gravity?

Don't drop one!