Great innovation taking place in the storage sector. Soon you'll be able to carry a lifetime of data in your right pocket, with a complete redundant backup in your left pocket, along with triple redundancy in your back pocket, and fully geographically distributed lifetime data and storage redundancy by keeping mirrored copies in your home and office as well!

Or imagine keeping complete redundant copies of not just the STEEM blockchain, but of EVERY BLOCKCHAIN in your back pockets alongside all your other data!

Backblaze has always been known for very dense storage, and when we started to see reports of storing up to 1 Zettabyte [1,000,000,000 TB] of storage in a single gram of DNA, Backblaze Labs kicked itself into high gear. We were new to bio-storage, so we wanted to take it slow and steady.

In keeping with our bootstrapping ethos our team has not only been studying how to best employ DNA storage, but has also taken an active role by volunteering* in our Alpha program as test subjects. Currently our server farm resides inside giant datacenters, but with DNA storage our ‘Storage Bods™’ could be… mobile!

Unfortunately, the path to getting there wasn't easy, and there may have been a few mishaps along the way. Their first volunteer Lego ran away for a day. They did find her again, but realized a better approach to animal and human testing was required.

(for those wondering, YES, April Fools'! Also, no animal was harmed in the creation of this post, as far as we are aware)

Full Story: Backblaze Labs: The Future of DNA Storage

HOWEVER, believe it or not this technology IS being developed for real, though it does have a loooong way to go...

Microsoft is buying ten million strands of DNA from biology startup Twist Bioscience to investigate the use of genetic material to store data.

The data density of DNA is orders of magnitude higher than conventional storage systems, with 1 gram of DNA able to represent close to 1 billion terabytes (1 zettabyte) of data. DNA is also remarkably robust; DNA fragments thousands of years old have been successfully sequenced.

Full Story: Microsoft experiments with DNA storage: 1,000,000,000 TB in a gram