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#1
Heh heh. Although the information may not deteriorate in the medium, when they say the info will last so many zillions of years without any information loss, they don't take into account that civilization will forget how to access the information. In other words, when this technology becomes obsolete nobody will even want to recreate a mechanism to retreive the info unless there's some human readable description of information that's so valuable it would justify doing so. Perhaps a map showing how to plot the location of an asteroid that's super mineral rich or something. And only by recreating the crystal reader gadget can you use a program that calculates the asteroid's path etc..
When everyone forgets how to read the crystal, the information loss will be 100%.
When you drag a needle on a 33 1/3 RPM record, you get some sound. So it might be sort of self-evident how to get the "information" out of The Clancy Brothers album. But accessing some hundred year old crystal technology may not be intuitive.