Hardware

From the article:

As intriguing as the idea is, we have to admit it smacks of a publicity stunt more than an earnest act of preservation. Even if the data is secure, are the robots the new points of failure? What’s to protect them from fires, floods, EMPs, and all the other threats? What about the readers, which are delicate lasers driven by algorithms? In all likelihood, any explorers in the year 12,000 that might stumble onto the remains of the Global Music Vault would just display it in a museum as a collection of crystal coasters.

I was asking myself similar questions to these, alongside even more basic details like, "What if the future computer systems simply aren't compatible with the old filesystems, thus indicating nothing as being present on the storage media (if it's even recognized as storage media to test)?" It's the deeply fascinating problem all long-term information storage/transmission faces regarding future comprehensibility.