I’ve posted several times over the years about the Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Disk which aims to preserve information over thousands of years by etching it onto a metal disk. The Atlantic has an interesting story about a website that is about to shut down that plans to archive its content on a series of such disks.
LANL [Los Alamos National Labs] came up with the technique Norsam [which also produced the Rosetta Disk for the Long Now Foundation] licenses as a way to preserve data “in case there was some kind of above-ground nuclear blast that eliminated digital files.” In Norsam’s version of the technique, the FIB shoots gallium ions at a silicon substrate coated in a material (a “resist”) that can be removed in a chemical bath; a similar process is used in mass producing computer chips. The gallium ions create exceedingly fine detail—the beam size is 7 nanometers—which are removed when the resist is put in a developing bath. The next stage uses electroforming, to create a “father” disk made of nickel from the master. The master is “sacrificed” in this process, and father is left with raised nickel deposits roughly 100 nanometers high . The father, in turn, creates “mothers,” which are reverse image recessed duplicates. Those can be the final product, but because for large runs that would prematurely degrade the father, each mother can be used to produce multiple “sons” as the end result. Bishop says his fee works out to roughly a dollar a page, plus $1,000 for a father plate, and $500 for a mother.