Since the human civilization entered the information age, an exponential growth of digital information globally posed great challenges to data storage. Current data storage devices have many defects, such as limited data density, short lifespan, environment pollution and so on. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the natural carrier of genetic information, was proposed to be a reasonable alternative due to its high information density, robustness, long half-life and low maintenance cost. Although DNA storage currently faces the challenges of high reading and writing costs, slow speed and high error rate, it has unique advantages in many fields, such as long-time archival storage, military data encryption and so on. The potential future directions of DNA storage mainly include applications under special scenarios such as space and military, encoding-decoding algorithms robust to base errors, in vivo DNA storage, information retrieval without sequencing, and integrated DNA storage system as well as a unified evaluation standard. It is hoped that in the future, DNA storage can achieve large-scale application, and open a new era of data storage.