Building on the ArchiveLaser® project, which was presented during the 2005 IS&T Archiving Conference, the further developments of the technology that have taken place in the followup NOAH project will be displayed in this paper. It will present a complete system that is able to store digital data as a bit stream on long-term stable optical film (microfilm) and retrieve it afterwards with simple optical scanners. The complete workflow has been demonstrated at the CeBIT fair in Hannover, Germany, in March 2006. One of the core achievements of our research is the density of more than 1 Terabyte per reel of film. This data carrier enjoys all the characteristics and advantages of an optical, analog data carrier: long-term durability of up to 500 years, no manipulation or virus attacks and independence from rapidly changing soft- and hardware generations. This workflow addresses storage providers, whose data necessarily has to be stored for more than 4 years and where the total cost of ownership, including a solid guarantee for future accessibility to this data, is crucial.
Carsten J. Angersbach, "Long-Term Storage of Digital Data on Microfilm" in Proc. IS&T Archiving 2006, 2006, pp 208 - 209, https://doi.org/10.2352/issn.2168-3204.2006.3.1.art00047