Microsoft Preserving Music on Glass, Storing It in Doomsday Vault

Svalbard, Norway is home to the Global Seed Vault, also known as the Doomsday Vault, and “deep inside the same arctic mountain location,” a Global Music Vault will preserve heaps of music stored on glass as part of the collaborative Project Silica venture by Elire Group and Microsoft.

As stated in a press release, Elire Group “is a venture group, commercializing global concepts with our own ventures for mobility, infrastructure, electric aviation and the global music vault.” Together with Microsoft, they’ve developed a proof of concept glass platter that can store up to 100 GB (gigabytes) of data in an incredibly tamper-proof manner.

These glass platters are ideal for doomsday/apocalyptic scenarios and are said to be “fully resilient to electromagnetic pulses (EMP), and to the most challenging environmental conditions” as well as other hazards such as being baked, boiled, scoured and/or flooded “without degradation of the data written on the glass.”

The goal of the project is to archive and store “tens of petabytes” (one petabyte equals roughly 1,000 terabytes, and one terabyte equals about 1,000 gigabytes) each year, with each coaster-sized slate of glass possessing a data lifetime of “many thousands of years” with music able to be encoded (encrypted or unencrypted) in any digital file format.

So, how is this done?

The press releases states that “a laser encodes data in glass by creating layers of three-dimensional nanoscale gratings and deformations.” It continues, “Machine learning algorithms read the data back by decoding images and patterns that are created as polarized light shines through the glass.”

Luke Jenkinson, Managing Director of Global Music Vault says of the urgent need for this advanced storage technology, “With over four million music producers globally, and over 60,000 songs being released just on Spotify every day, today’s digital and physical data storage solutions are quickly becoming outdated, irrelevant and a risk to our future. We not only want to put this high on the global music industry agenda, we want to work with the best companies in the world to find solutions. As we want to offer the global music ecosystem an eternal solution, we believe that Microsoft’s Silica is that exact solution for our storage needs.”

For further information about the Global Music Vault, visit their website.