Photo: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images
CDs and DVDs get scratched or broken. External hard drives get corrupted or fried. So how do you store important data for the long haul? Hitachi thinks it has hit upon the answer. It recently unveiled a method for storing data as tiny dots inside a thin, rugged quartz glass plate. The bits, which are encoded in a binary format, can be retrieved using a standard optical microscope connected to a computer.












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Willie Jones
Willie Jones is an associate editor at IEEE Spectrum. In addition to editing and planning daily coverage, he manages several of Spectrum's newsletters and contributes regularly to the monthly Big Picture section that appears in the print edition.
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