Researchers at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab have developed a new type of optical memory that stores data by transferring light from rare-earth element atoms embedded in a solid material to nearby quantum defects. They published their study in Physical Review Research.

Study: https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.033170

    • naeap@sopuli.xyz
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      8 days ago

      Well, for backups this still sounds kinda nice

      Tape backups are rather slow as well - at least as far as I know. The professional stuff was always out of my league monetary wise.

      If someone has a good alternative, I’m absolutely up for it.

      Currently I’m using a local server with just a RAID1 to mirror important files on my workstation and those (incremental) backups are getting encrypted and uploaded to a cloud drive.

      But for really large data amounts, this isn’t really practical. So I only use this route for business documents, invoices, etc.
      But for large data like code, I’m currently only doing a local mirroring (although on multiple devices), so if my office burns down, I’ll lose quite much - at the moment I’m lucky, because I can push my code changes to a customer git mirror, so I should be fine on that front for now.

      But still, I loathe the day, I really need to restore from my cloud backup.
      Maybe I should do some dry runs periodically, to verify my restore path works. But just like server stuff, I really don’t like to touch it that much o⁠:⁠-⁠)

      I’m currently using BORG (with Vorta) to backup everything locally and distribute it to my server and the cloud.

      If anyone has a better idea, I’d be really grateful…

      Doing periodically hard disk backups and giving them to a partner company (while I keep theirs in my safe) seems to not really work out in the long term, as I’m often on business trips and our exchanges got more seldom over time…