What's really amazing to me is that in a state that was recently hit so hard by a natural disaster and has already lost so many of its records, that multiple copies of this data apparently does not exist on several servers strategically located in secure sites where both natural and mechanical disaster can be practically eliminated.

I've met hundreds of clerks, recorders, other county officials and many of them are not that tech-savvy.  To me, I don't see how you can put that process in their hands and if so, who agreed to take on that initiative?  There are automated options that backup your data every day, hour or minute if need be.  Compared to some of the amazing technology I've seen such as Auto-Indexing, OCR/ICR, natural language processing and much more, backing up your data seems like a fairly simple process and somebody (I'm not sure who to blame) evidently dropped the ball.