Memory is an essential issue for our society and for every one of us up to now various media have been used to store our memories and a wealth of information. The average Life Expectancy of an inscription on a stone is ten thousand years. On parchment its a thousand years. On film one hundred. On vinyl fifty years. With computers our memory is facing an unexpected vulnerability some technologies have already disappeared this uncertainty is especially troubling because we evolve to to make everything digital believing our data would remain retrievable for a very long time yet not a single digital medium has managed to achieve long term success will we be able to ensure the survival of our digital data or is it doomed to disappear sooner or later. With the advent of widespread computer use our data is now written in binary code this code which offers an infinite number of combinations is based on combining two digits zero one one these are the only messages all computers know how to interpret. All memory Storage Systems have changed. Their interconnected and d. Materialized and now hold our personal medical scientific technical and administrative information. How are we going to be able to hand down an increasingly massive and complex digital heritage. What about the hard drives that most of us used to store our data. They form the core of a Computers Memory every day they record massive amounts of Digital Information thanks to a technique that space ingenious and precise. The hard drive consists of a set of searchable platters that revolver at high speed to retain of these disks creates an air flow that keeps the magnetic read head at an infinitesimal distance from the surface. Theyre relatively speaking this corresponds to a concord flying at full speed one meter above the ground met for that though you can see the smallest choke the tiniest piece of dust which is large in relation to the distance between the head and the platter will be catastrophic if thats twelfth here but once the head is touched the platter the hard drive is day because the head is stuck to the platter via a little are bonded. By your. Hard drives are vulnerable to shock and not entirely safe from dust and impurities thats why manufacturers cant guarantee them for more than five years. Does the flash memory in our cameras and u. S. B. Sticks offer a more reliable alternative. Mclean v a u. S. B. Flash drives s s ds as well as the flash cards used in cameras for example and raise another problem in that they have a finite number of read write cycles and so the number of read write cycles is quite large up to one hundred thousand but in Computer Systems hes one hundred thousand cycles off reached fairly quickly if however you use a u. S. B. Drive an s. S. D. Or a flash card for our Craft Services in other words your data on it and then store the device then its entirely possible to keep the information for a dozen year absence as in more. Than eighty percent us. A Life Expectancy of five years ten years twenty years humankind has never in its history stored so much information on such fragile media. Will we be able to store on digital memories for more than a century let alone several millenia. We now have a mineral thats heat and acid resistant that can withstand radio waves it may not be indestructible but in any case its fast drugger than any stone or ballistic its quartz. In japan engineers at the hitachi laboratories partnered with Kyoto University have been working with. Trying to create the most stable digital storage medium ever. But they still have to discover a way to overcome the extreme resistance of this rock crystal. We began our research in one nine hundred ninety six. When the mural laboratory discovered that a laser could modify the structure of quartz. As much as we did a study the possibility of using this technique for long term data storage to connect up. Thank you so you stop this. I am now going to record data on this sliver of quartz. The data is recorded by f. M. Tow seconds later this laser emits pulses of around one billionth of a second. The pulse creates perfectly formed microscopic dots a dot for zero and another dot for one in binary code. Dozens of dots can be recorded at once. The information is embedded in the layers so its unaffected by dust or scratches. Another advantage of course its transparency means the information can be read by any microscope. That was also the producer of digital data for long periods we cannot always rely on a reader to access information but its players who are no longer manufactured for example it would become difficult to retrieve any data. With this technical we can access the data using a traditional optical microscope we call is one with the information even in a distant future. What time frame one hundred years five hundred thousand ten thousand test the strength of this medium a slice of quartz is placed in an oven heated to a thousand degrees celcius in. Two hours later the slice and the embedded data are intact. It also withstand shock. And its thrown into water at ambient temperature an acid bath has no effect on an. Outing are determined that the Life Expectancy of the data we have to read it on the strips of quarters is extremely long from three hundred million to several billion years in the likelihood therefore stored data reliably and safely for extremely long periods one. What still an experimental procedure looks to be extremely promising one major hurdle that remains is limited Storage Capacity for now its barely greater than that of blu ray technology. This would be sufficient to save the data of Waste Storage Centers for a very long time. But were a long way from being able to handle the flood of information produced by certain scientific tools. The sun particle accelerator is a giant rig twenty seven kilometers in succumb friends buried a hundred meters underground on the french swiss border. To particle beams a circulated at high speed inside this ring. Analyses of the collision of these pms captured by ultra sensitive detectors have helped pierce the mysteries of matter and the origin of the universe. Where they are the same as the fact that where the particles of the air is to collide are going from both directions here and they collide there in the middle of the first twenty collisions. You can compare this all is what it is at the camera but in your digital camera the sound was about this size was saying this is a big volume but then there was a father difference is that a camera there because. They if the pictures are circuit was here we think forty million times a second a picture this corresponds to producing ten thousand david is per second. Given that Quantity Information must be selected. Electronic filters only let through data thats considered patent even so the amount of data processed by the Computing Center is impressive. Initially this data is stored on thousands of hard drives which in turn are stored in computer racks in this way scientists can access the data they need for their research very quickly. Yet the amount of data is so large that it would take several decades to analyze it even if cern had a network of computers that could process millions of operations per second. Unlocking the secrets of matter in the universe takes time a period of time thats much too long given the fragility of the hard drives on these servers. Thats why the cern i t engineers had to use another medium to ensure the long term storage of their valuable data. Dont believe you now see the large hadron collider data are stored here suggesting that the word for the year means in these cartridges that contain tapes all over to sit in the same automated units like these to fetch them when a physicist needs to read salmon reanalyzed its true that. There are more than fifty thousand robots manage tapes which are used as archive media for all of the l. H. D. Data. Why tapes in fact ive been here at least fifteen or twenty years and the same question always comes up to me is what are we going to change the system the system of the answer is no a particular example so there are several reasons first reasoned analysis demonstrate the tapes are thousand times more reliable than disks need to make second tapes when theyre not reuse and dont consume any electricity. In spots and going to city twenty third if you drop a hard drive theres a very good chance that it will be completely destroyed thats not true and take it in so that a plastic container could be damaged but we will be able to retrieve the data. Through for tapes reliability the first computer was made in the one nine hundred fifty s. Opted for tape. And since that pioneering era the Storage Capacity of tapes has been constantly increasing. And. That the basis of the Storage Capacity of tapes as for disks and the density of transistors on a processor is limited off. And then you get today several manufacturers have proven through lab test tapes could achieve a capacity of fifty terabytes per cartridge just in the cycle the hope that we are therefore at a factor of ten from these directly limits to the socalled this and to. Much capacity is still growing. A magnetic tape can now store up to three hundred thirty terabytes the quantity of information generated by the l h c may seem to be enormous but its just a drop in the ocean of data that we produce on a planetary scale. Some two hundred eighty billion emails are sent every twenty four hours google alone receives three point eight million search queries a minute. These. Astronomical numbers are so hard to conceive of that the computer sector had to invent its own scale based on the byte. By byte consists of eight bits representing zeros or ones so a single character of text corresponds to one byte. One page a kilobyte. Three hundred pages a megabyte. A library a gigabyte. Five libraries a d. V. D. Six million books a terabyte or a stack of two hundred d. V. D. s. Or two hundred metre high stack of d. V. D. s represents a petabyte. A one kilometer stack of d. V. D. s an exabyte is the equivalent of all the information produced by humanity through two thousand and three a stack of d. V. D. s stretching from the earth to the moon represents one point eight set of bytes or all the information produced in the year twenty eleven a stack of d. V. D. s linking mars to the sun represents a lot of bite for the volume of digital data generated within the next five years. At first sight no existing medium could store such a huge mass of data does this mean our societies are facing an impasse certainly not scientists responsible for storing data have understood that we now have to change our mindset then our looking for a device we all carry within us and that has already proved to be effective. This complex system whose immense resources still hold many surprises is d. N. A. Contained in the chromosomes of all forms of life. Nicole. From him and his team are exploring this aspect of d. N. A. At the European Bioinformatics Institute in the u. K. Theres lots of reasons why d. N. A. Is a good medium its very very small its very inexpensive to last so a very long time it doesnt require any energy and we will always be able to read d. N. A. So Something Like a floppy disk is no longer readable in a few years time probably d. V. D. s will no longer be readable because we wont have the technology any longer to do that but d. N. A. We will always have some technology to read d. N. A. The Technology Changes at the moment its changing very fast every couple of years theres a new machine to read d. N. A. But because its the stuff in our in our own genomes we will always have a new machine that can read. Decided to encode in d. N. A. A photograph of their institute a text on genetics some shakespeares sonnets and an audio file of Martin Luther kings famous i have a dream speech. Yeah. The challenge was to move from a computer language consisting of zeros and ones to a much more complex genetic code that involves not just two but four components the four d. N. A. Molecule symbolized by the letters ac. These four elements came together at the bottom of the oceans millions of years ago to create the vocabulary of life. The famous d. N. A. Double helix is certainly is a first code that ever existed on planet earth. But with d. N. A. We have four that we can use and its like its like looking at lego where i have four colors of blocks and i can put those together in any order to make a message and we devised a code that would use different its like colors but letters of d. N. A. Little block would represent one byte or one small part of the signal and then we could put those together in any order to make the largest signal and we devised a code that would do this but would minimize the number of errors that would happen due to reading and writing. Goldman and his staff started with the zeros and ones and coding the photograph text and audio file. They then applied their mathematical code to switch from this binary language to the four letters ac g g forming the g n a k. To photograph text and speech will then fragmented into thousands of d. N. A. Segments. These were then reproduced chemically. At the end of the predecessors the original digital message is recorded on thousands of inert artificial d. N. A. Strands. Now the d. N. A. Holds the information in physical form it looks like its empty but theres a tiny speck of d. N. A. In there and we sent that to the dark trees in heidelberg to be read. This point genetics takes over from digital processing. To test the princess the strands was sent to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in germany. Biologists place the d. N. A. Strands in sequence and. These instruments will read the combinations of the four letters ac t. G. s. Imagine the data which i could use and Research Facilities like here you. Dont have to find a purple grid to start or at least different in the first instance otherwise all the scientific progress we are doing in your future becomes x. And it starts already did our society is losing money and actually i think that the research on the and he starts as one of the really promising fields was. Another advantage of d. N. A. Its a solid material that stands up perfectly to transport. God the anything you have to really does repaired the first thing is they have to keep it cold and you have to keep it dry because this is preventing any chemical reactions from the third thing as you should prevent it from life. So its not surprising that the frozen dry ground of siberia was perfect for preserving the d. N. A. Fragments of animals that had died thousands of years ago. About one year ago a scientific paper was published studying the genomes of ancient horses and they had samples of d. N. A. That had lasted for seven hundred thousand years and they were able to successfully read back much of that d. N. A. So thats an experiment that has already been done that shows the. D. N. A. Can last Holding Information holding a signal for more than half a million years. It took the german team nearly two weeks to decode all the d. N. A. Sequences sent by the British Research institute. All the d. N. A. Strands would read and all the messages from be retrieved. To receive the sequence read information back from the heidelberg laboratory we decode those fragments of d. N. A. We put back together the binary files based on the information and then we want to compare whether that exactly matches what we started with the photograph looks exactly the same and we also checked in the computer whether every single bit every zero and one was correct and it will. Make you meant his colleagues demonstrated that it did to tell the information in d. N. A. Strands is a perfectly realistic alternative which could also often large Storage Capacity. So using the same system that we use in our experiment the full size of all the information in the whole world is two cubic meters so thats two meters. By one meter by one meter so you could fit all in the back of a large car. But now the process is still experimental as its complex and expensive. Yes it. It is conceivable and within the realm of possibility that in the future storage sites could archive millions of test tubes containing strands of d. N. A. Memory just the way we store and organize books in our libraries today. Our memory could then be set into the language of living matter. The question of longevity would be solved. But another problem a considerable one would still remain. With the internet information has become unstable as if the books in our libraries were being replaced every second a reliable memory system must factor in this dynamic none of the storage methods seen de quartz tape or even d. N. A. Can record unstable memory our digital data our photographs our emails now have a medium that matches their proliferation a sort of perpetually changing library the cloud. The term as ambiguous it suggests that our digital data has become totally ephemeral but thats not the case the cloud does indeed have a physical location in data centers. A data center is first and foremost a stronghold a type of safe that guarantees the security of the data it contains sascha of each poor from the French Institute for research in computer science. And Automation Office to take us around the largest European DataCenter Located in northern france. Some of the billions of digital data that transits every second over the internet is processed and stored in these threads. And says this is a rack there are hundreds of them all around us they consist of going to shooters and disks it is this is the cloud of. All the memory of companies memories of individuals your photographs your emails its all located in racks like this somewhere on the planet in the data centers. The cloud of data centers manages our digital lives every day including an increasingly large share of our private lives. The memory of humanity the memory of individuals is to a certain extent contained in data centers as and girls. So you dont know this data is extremely valuable we cant lose it we dont want to lose your photographs and the only way the method that we have now found to keep and protect your information