The Energon Pub

According to Shockwave's bio, it say that Shockwave's Autobot form was stolen from old historical files. Does that really mean that Longarm was indeed a young robot very long ago, before his death, or least he's still exists in his extremely old age, and then Shockwave scan a picture of that robot so that he can assume his identity?

I can't see an agent as meticulous as Shockwave allowing someone he copied to be anything other than completely destroyed/disintegrated. Even the chance that someone might stumble across the body thousands of years later would be unacceptable.