Image credit: The New Yorker

“Could we store our data in DNA?”

Tape Ark Founder & CEO Guy C. Holmes was featured this month in a leading article by The New Yorker “Could we store our data in DNA” – a prestigious American magazine known for its in-depth journalism, commentary, cultural criticism, and fiction.

Guy was interviewed by journalist Matthew Hutson for his expertise on retrieving data from damaged tape media. Tapes and drives degrade over time, and restoring data from legacy tape requires in-depth technical knowledge and experience. In the interview, Guy showed Matthew a video of old tape disintegrating as it moved inside a drive. “These little black specks that you see here on the left of the screen—those are Word documents and Excel spreadsheets that have fallen off the tape because it has become so brittle.” Guy also described rescuing measurements of lunar dust that had been beamed back from the moon after the Apollo missions.

In response to the article release, Guy said “As a global business on a quest to liberate the world’s dark data so that new discoveries can be made, being featured in The New Yorker is a significant achievement in our efforts to educate organizations on the risks of physical tape data storage. Some of the world’s largest and most valuable data sets remain trapped on tapes—but tapes don’t last forever, and neither do the drives that read them. As AI faces data shortages for training, we must unlock this hidden content to ensure it is preserved and utilized for the benefit of humankind.”

As the digital landscape evolves, we must rethink our approach to data preservation. Tape storage is not a viable long-term solution—but with innovative technologies like cloud migration and DNA storage on the horizon, we have a chance to safeguard knowledge for generations to come!

Read the full New Yorker article here and to learn more abut magnetic tape deterioration, click here.

Tape Ark’s video of a deteriorating tape in action:

Did Guy predict the future of data storage back in 2011?

For a light read  – check out Guy’s entertaining article which featured in ASEG (Australian Society of Exploration Geophysicists) in Oct 2011 – Titled “The Futurist”