Hey, how about this:

Bulky Cameras, Meet The Lens-less FlatCam

And this:

Eternal 5D data storage could record the history of humankind

What we have here is a new type of camera and an amazing data storage system. The camera is a digital imaging sensor, as you’d have in any camera, but without the glass or plastic lenses. Instead, the sensor is covered with a flat sheet pierced with a multitude of tiny pinholes. The result is a bajillion pinhole cameras each recording its own image; software then processes the data together. The article suggests a flat camera the size of a wall; this would see essentially *everything* in a room. Presumably this would allow for 3D imaging like the photo analyzer in “Blade Runner.”

The image quality currently being produced is pretty awful, but as they say, it’s early days. But at least they’re still using Lenna.

The second article includes this:

Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.

The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ) opening a new era of eternal data archiving.

It seems to be a ways away from home application, but the technology appears pretty remarkable. The researchers are apparently using disks not because the glass needs to spin, but out of convenience or convention. The laser-writer seems to scan back and forth in a linear fashion. This might mean that these “data crystals” could come in *any* shape. Thus any piece of glass could be encoded with vast amounts of data. Eyeglasses, bits of jewelry, smart phone cases, wrist watch lenses, the bottoms of drinking glasses, etc.

Irritatingly, while the article says that they can put 360 terabytes on a disk, it doesn’t define how big that disk is. Assuming they mean the size of a CD, 12 cm in diameter, this equates to about 3.2 terabytes per square centimeter. This means the data capacity of a good sized hard drive on something  the size of a fingernail (but apparently fairly thick). Something the size of a a cheap rhinestone bedazzled onto an awful sweater could probably hold a few gigabytes of data.

The data can’t be re-written, so it’s for archival purposes rather than general data use. But I’m intrigued by the idea of being able to back up my entire archive every few months onto a chunk of glass the size of a postage stamp.

No information is given on read/write speed.

The “eternal” nature of the data storage is of course questionable. Bring a hammer down on it, and the data is gone. This might be a dandy way to archive all of human knowledge for the future, but it’ll only be useful if people in the future can read it. And it’s of course by no means certain that people will be able to read this… or even recognize it. So if you really want to set up archives for deep time, you’ll need to have multi-layered archive that only open up when investigators reach certain tech levels. Perhaps a massive stone  edifice that only opens when the people around it learn to read it, and learn from it how to open the hidden lock. And inside that, a bronze archive that only opens when they’ve learned how to build electrical systems, and so on. How to keep people from simply battering they way through to the unreadable bits of glass in the middle? Dunno. Perhaps inside each archive isn’t the next archive, but the *map* to the next archive. Put the final full archive on the Moon or Mars, with backups on Ceres and Vesta.