DNJA

Project

The continuous growth of digital data places increasing demands on existing storage infrastructures. Conventional storage technologies such as magnetic tapes, hard disk drives, and solid-state drives have seen steady improvements in capacity and performance. However, they remain limited by physical constraints, ongoing energy requirements, and the need for regular hardware maintenance and replacement. These challenges become particularly apparent in long-term archival scenarios, often described as “write-once, read-rarely” use cases, where data must be preserved reliably over long periods with minimal access.

From a broader perspective, long-term digital storage also raises economic and environmental concerns. Data centers require continuous energy input for cooling, redundancy, and system stability, and storage hardware must be replaced periodically to avoid data loss. As global data volumes continue to increase, these factors raise questions about the long-term sustainability of current storage paradigms and motivate the exploration of alternative approaches.

Our Goal

In this context, our project looks at DNA-based data storage as an alternative for long-term archiving. Our first goal is to reproduce existing DNA storage workflows and understand how they perform in practice.

We focus on error handling, efficiency, and robustness, aiming to improve encoding and decoding and to identify procedures that could be reused or standardized. In the end, we want to make the trade-offs of DNA data storage more tangible and show where this technology actually makes sense—and where it does not.