This week, the Ministry of Justice launched a consultation on its plan to digitise its vast archive of wills. The only problem is that it also wants to destroy its original paper copies – which date from 1858.

This destruction is supposed to save the taxpayer £4.5 million per year, although wills that ‘belong to notable individuals or have significant historical interest’ will be retained. The proposal has been met with strong disapproval by historians and archivists – not because digitisation is inherently a bad idea, but because digitising an archive and then destroying the originals was never how it was meant to work.

Digitisation does have a role to play in preserving documents – it reduces human handling for a start – but its primary purpose was always to make records accessible. The National Archives, for example, has digitised all the wills it holds, and they can be downloaded for a modest fee. But the National Archives did not then go on to destroy everything it had digitised.

The reasons for this should be obvious, but they were made even clearer on 31 October when a cyberattack on the British Library put all of its systems and digitised resources out of action. It remains to be seen if its digitised collections will be saved after the hack. Since most of the information held in archives is no longer sensitive and confidential, it does not receive the same level of protection as crucial infrastructure.

Digital storage is vulnerable in other ways, too. When a latter-day Domesday Book was compiled by the BBC in 1986, amassing huge quantities of survey data on 1980s England, it was stored on 12-inch video discs which, a few years later, turned out to be unplayable. The devices used to read them had become obsolete. That data was eventually recovered, but the pace of technological change means there is no guarantee the digital data of today will be recoverable in the future. Calls to maintain redundant analogue systems to back up digital systems in case of catastrophe usually fall on deaf ears, because to invest in the analogue is retrograde – unacceptable dissent from the presentist fixation on the latest thing.

An archive made up entirely to digital storage is a triumph of hope over reality, like people who have their bodies cryogenically frozen so they might be revived by doctors of the future. According to Justice Minister Mike Freer, sounding like a bulldozer-happy 1960s urban planner, ‘digitisation allows us to move with the times’. This is just an appeal to novelty for novelty’s sake.

If the Ministry of Justice’s plan to destroy the originals of 100 million Victorian and 20th-century wills seems ill-advised, the plan to retain some ‘historically significant’ wills and destroy others has proved equally controversial. It is the job of historians, not of archivists, to determine what is ‘historically significant’; views of what is and is not historically significant evolve over time. Social historians who are interested in the lives of ordinary people have been particularly alarmed by this aspect of the plan. The apparently arbitrary selection of certain ‘significant’ wills to be retained in hard copy, while everything else is entrusted to the dubious fortunes of digital storage, seems an affront to men and women whose only presence in the historical record may be their last will and testament.

Of course, the Ministry of Justice is not an organisation whose primary purpose is to maintain an archive. It is natural enough, perhaps, for ministers to wonder about savings by minimising archival costs (although why ministers would embark on a hugely expensive digitisation project at the same time is baffling). It might be pointed out that thin, acidic 19th- and 20th-century paper has a much shorter lifespan than the sturdy paper of earlier eras which was made from rags, so the physical archive’s days are numbered anyway. This is true. But if the Victorians erred in using paper with a fairly short archival lifespan, that was their mistake to make, and not ours to compound. No archive lasts forever; but relying on digital storage and destroying the originals is one way to ensure its lifespan is even shorter.

Archives are odd places. They are resources for the present, but they are also time capsules for the future. No one disputes that surviving medieval documents are worth preserving, because they have already endured for so long. But it is easy to forget that 19th- and 20th-century documents (if they survive) will one day have that sort of significance, conferred by extreme age. It is not for us to determine the future significance of these documents. After all, they are just passing through, on their way to the far future. But we owe it to the people of the past to give their stories a fighting chance of reaching that future.