[waiquoo]

The other aspect is that the shelf life of DNA can be significantly longer than other mediums. I haven't personally done anything with DNA data storage, but the idea is that tape storage is good for 30-50 yrs, but we can recover intact DNA from mammoths (~10,000 yrs)

[cdirkx]

Isn't this mostly due to the huge redundancy? All trillion cells of that mammoth carried duplicates of the encoded information, and recovering that information involves a lot of matching incomplete degraded strings against each other.

The estimated half-life for DNA is apparently 521 years [1] (still quite a bit longer than 50 years).

[1] https://www.livescience.com/38150-dna-degradation-rate.html

[DoctorOetker]

I believe that DNA recovery after 10k years is not very representative of DNA durability.

[waiquoo]

You are correct, but the variable of interest is recoverability