The amount of data the world keeps is growing faster than cheap long-term storage. One line of research encodes information into strands of synthetic DNA, which is astonishingly dense and can remain readable for a very long time if kept cool and dry, unlike tapes and drives that decay.
A thimble of DNA could in principle hold enormous archives, making it appealing for records meant to last decades or centuries. Writing and reading the data is still slow and costly, so it is not for everyday use, but as a way to preserve rarely accessed archives it remains an active and intriguing area of study.