During last Monday’s congressional hearing into the Internal Revenue Service’s loss of emails, Blake Farenthold, a Texas Republican, offered what on first glance seemed a simple solution to archiving agency email: “I went on Amazon and found you could buy a terabyte hard drive for $59. Buy two of them, so $120.”

If only it were that easy. Two large-capacity hard drives would indeed have provided the storage the I.R.S. office needed, but Mr. Farenthold’s proposal obscures the other obstacles the I.R.S. and other government agencies face. Federal agencies are hampered both by outdated and expensive computing infrastructure and by regulations that won’t require modern storage and retrieval techniques until the end of 2016 at the earliest.

Lois Lerner, the former I.R.S. official who is accused of politically motivated mistreatment of Tea Party-aligned groups seeking tax exemptions, supposedly lost backup copies of her emails when a hard drive crashed. But it appears she was not required to make electronic backups. Strange as it may sound, I.R.S. employees were supposed to be saving their important emails — which as everyone knows are written on a computer, transmitted electronically and then read on a computer screen — by printing them out. On paper.

Although federal law does not require a “paper-first” approach to email management, a number of agencies have instituted policies making that the default practice. The I.R.S.'s own standards for email say that “maintaining a copy of an email or its attachments within the I.R.S. email MS Outlook application does not meet the requirements of maintaining an official record.” The I.R.S. standards include an instruction to “print and file email and its attachments if they are either permanent records or if they relate to a specific case.”