[a_bonobo]

That's not possible with 23andMe data, they have 640,000 SNPs, not the entire genome/exome/methylome. They have 640k points where the genome is often different from others, but your own genome is 3Gbp long (3,000,000,000 basepairs) with usually a few million SNPs per person. 23andMe has a subset of the diversity in your genome.

[upwardbound]

That's good to know. In that case, my concern would lie with the physical saliva samples that 23andMe has retained, since they could be comprehensively sequenced later.

[a_bonobo]

That is true! Samples are usually good forever in the freezer. Do they keep all samples?

Running -80C freezers is not cheap! I have 3 -80C freezers in my lab, those large chest-freezers, and each uses 22 kWh per day for a total of 66 kWh per day. Apparently the average US household consumes 29 kWh per day, so we use up 2 houses per day.

Our freezers certainly don't hold the 14 million samples 23andMe supposedly has, more like in the low thousands. They'd need the power-usage of a city to keep all those samples OK!

[aden1ne]

You can extract the DNA and store that instead - and they already had to that to their analysis in the first place. Far smaller volume than the raw sample.

Storing this for an effectively indefinite amount is not uncommon. I used to work at a clinical genetics lab, and some material had to be stored (by law!) for a whopping 120 years.