White paper - Alternative Storage Technologies

Alternative Storage Technologies Whitepaper

PIQL’S TECHNOLOGY What it is: Piql offers Services based on a turn- key system designed to comply with the needs of long-term digital preservation. The result is a storage medium that allows digital data to be preserved safely and efficiently, and easily retriev- able independent of future access to specific technologies or vendors, the piqlFilm. Piql uses high-resolution photosensitive film as a digital storage medium. Data is written to film as large QR-codes, each containing 8.8 million pixels. This allows any kind of data to be preserved offline, on a storage medium with a documented lifetime of 500 years.

Piql has developed all software and hardware needed to write and read back data. Yet there is no vendor lock-in as the decoding software is open source and the data can be retrieved by using any digital camera and computer available in the future. Future-proof WORM: Piql’s solution offers many of the same preservation qualities as microfilm, but applied to digital data. As a true WORM stored offline, it is impossible to manipulate or delete data once it is written. Digital data written as 0 and 1 obviously need decoding to get back the original file. To make data retrieval future-proof, explanations of how to decode and retrieve the information is written as human readable text on

Data preserved in digital and visual formats