John Timmer, writing for Ars Technica:
In general, though, the DNA was very robust. The authors simply dried it out before shipping it to a lab in Germany (with a layover in the UK), where it was decoded. Careful storage in a cold, dry location could keep it viable for much, much longer. The authors estimate their storage density was about 2.2 Petabytes per gram, and that it included enough DNA to recover the data about ten additional times.
That’s incredibly dense. No wonder living things use DNA as their blueprints and operating manuals—you can squeeze a lot of instructions into a lightweight, efficient package.