Is DNA the next generation of data backup?

By: Michael Cade, Senior Global Technologist, Veeam

Data is now the common denominator which sits across everything organizations do. Whether it’s driving the day-to-day activities we all take for granted or providing the new insights which shape our thinking around some of humanity’s biggest questions, data augments and empowers human intelligence.The staggering amount of data we’re generating is already causing challenges, with data center technologies requiring significant power and cooling, as well as ongoing maintenance and monitoring. We could be moving towards a huge bottleneck in the available capabilities, as both the volumes and speed of access to data increase further. 

Nature’s storage medium

One alternative to our current storage devices could be DNA-based data storage. Being ultra-compact and easy to replicate gives DNA big advantages. One gram of DNA could potentially hold as much as 455 exabytes of data, according to the New Scientist. That’s more than all the digital data currently in the world, by a huge margin. And while DNA is itself quite fragile, when stored in the right conditions it can be incredibly stable.

Progress on the technology has been extremely promising, with Microsoft and University of Washington researchers last year developing the DNA storage device that can carry out the entire process automatically. Using the device, researchers encoded the word ‘hello’ on to DNA, and were able to convert it back to data readable by a computer. 

From DNA to glass

In the race to find the data storage medium of the future, glass is another material in the running. Microsoft’s Project Silica, for example, is a proof of concept that uses quartz glass as a storage medium. Lasers permanently change the structure of glass, making it possible to store data that can then be read by machine learning algorithms. By taking up a fraction of the space, and not requiring the climate-controlled storage or other regular maintenance of typical storage mediums, it holds immense promise for archiving and backup activity.

But while techniques might be steadily improving, the time and cost of decoding the information needs to come down before DNA data storage can be used commercially. While scientists have been experimenting with storing digital data in DNA since 2012, for example, it took 21 hours for that 5-byte ‘hello’ message to be written and then read back out. However, progress is steady – it cost $100m in 2001 to sequence a human genome, today all it takes is two days and $1,000. 

The business of backup could be transformed by DNA. Archives and data centers, and their immense physical footprints, could be eliminated. The sum of the world’s knowledge may well one day be stored on something you need a microscope to observe. And as we generate even more data, and reach the limit of our current storage technologies, the value of powerful alternatives will only become greater. Today’s complex backup efforts could be reduced down to a single record, created once, that lasts well beyond any living memory. The next generation of storage technology is in some ways already here – we just need to learn how to harness it.