Having reread your post, I see that you are indeed talking about the media degrading, and that with a lossless file format the degradation would be less noticeable. However, the way it is written gives the impression that a lossy format means your file is simply rotting away like a head of lettuce, while the lossless one is immune to the ravages of time. Both file formats suffer the same amount of damage due to media degradation, but the point I believe you were trying to make is that a lossless format is more forgiving of the errors.