While this census has only been running five years, the statistics show a 22% attrition rate over four years.
Some may last longer than a decade, the company says, others may last little more than a year; but the short answer is that storage devices don’t last forever.
A permanent solution
Science is now looking to nature, however, to find the best way to store data in a way that will make it last for millions of years.
Researchers at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, believe the answer may lie in the data storage system that exists in every living cell: DNA.
So compact and complex are its strands that just 1 gram of DNA is theoretically capable of containing all the data of internet giants such as Google and Facebook, with room to spare.
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“Already the prices for human genome sequences have dropped from several millions of dollars a few years ago to just hundreds of dollars now,” Grass said.
“It makes sense to integrate these advances in medical and genome analysis into the world of IT.”
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