Oh I agree completely, digital is the way to go, but by no means is digital storage "cheap". Cheaper than it used to be? Certainly. But not "cheap", especially on a government budget.

To throw this into perspective, the city that I work for is spending $82k on 50ish TB of storage and backing that up. And that doesn't include the operating system to run on the server, nor the power to actually run it. Thats just the physical system. Not to mention that that hardware is only good for so long, then it need to be replaced and all that data needs to be migrated. And you need to pay someone to manage that server to make sure nothing gets corrupted or lost due to unforeseen hardware failure.

I still think that this data should be kept for 7 years, maybe longer, but no matter how you store it, it's not "cheap".