Yeah, it certainly can go that way unfortunately. I’m in favour of digitisation generally, but at a minimum it relies on:

1. Redundant storage (always), hosted and paid for by the government (in this case).
2. Published and documented open file formats.

I believe that, in general, things lost to time on the net violate one of those two rules. They either resided on a single privately held server which was discontinued, or the data was locked up in some proprietary file format which was inevitably replaced for the sake of selling the new software product.

The benefits of pulling this off correctly are enormous:

1. Data lasts a very long time.
2. Documents can be authenticated and change-controlled.
3. Documents can be shared with any number of users simultaneously.