
Though hard disk drive technology has improved in recent times, you’d be a brave soul indeed to use one for more than a couple of years without backing it up. But now a team of scientists has made a hard disk from sapphire which it claims will last 1 million years—just don’t expect to be able to afford it. The project was born when nuclear waste repositories realized they needed to preserve records of where they’d buried waste not just in the near-future, but for tens of thousands of years. Currently, there’s no digital format that we know can last that long with certainty. Read the full story at Gizmodo.