DNA data storage will dramatically effect the way organizations think about data retention, data protection, and archival by providing capacity density and longevity several orders of magnitude beyond anything available today, while reducing requirements for both power, cooling, and fixity checks. One of challenges of any long term archival storage is being able to recover the data after possibly decades or longer. To do this, the reader must be able to bootstrap the archive, akin to how an OS is loaded after the master boot record is loaded.

DNA lacks many key attributes found in other traditional storage media types including locality and addressability. The Rosetta Stone workgroup is aiming to solve the issue of enabling archive readers to understand key metadata about the archive and position them to be able to consume its contents. This session will provide an overview of where the Rosetta Stone workgroup is in the process of creating a recommended approach for this issue.