The Jain account of transmission begins with loss. Tradition holds that a twelve-year famine in Magadha, some generations after Mahavira's death in the fifth or fourth century BCE, drove a large body of monks south under Bhadrabahu while others remained in the north under Sthulabhadra. When the two groups met again their memories of the teaching, and their practice, had diverged. A recitation assembly at Pataliputra is said to have attempted a recovery of the Angas; the Purvas were already slipping away.
Further councils followed, at Mathura and Valabhi, and the decisive one was the second assembly at Valabhi in Gujarat, presided over by Devarddhigani Kshamashramana. Tradition dates it 980 or 993 years after Mahavira's liberation, giving roughly 453 or 466 CE, and credits it with committing the surviving canon to writing and fixing the recension the Svetambara use. That is around a thousand years of oral transmission, and the Svetambara do not dispute the length of it; they hold the lineage of memorising ascetics reliable enough to have carried the substance.
The Digambara draw the opposite conclusion from the same history. On their account the erosion was total: the Angas as well as the Purvas were gone by roughly the second century CE, with Bhutabali remembered as the last ascetic to hold even partial knowledge of them. What Valabhi produced, on this reading, was a well-meant reconstruction by monks who no longer had the originals, and it therefore cannot be scripture. The disagreement is not a footnote about manuscripts. It runs alongside the sects' other divisions, whether a monk may wear clothing, whether a woman can attain liberation in her present birth, and it means the two largest Jain traditions do not share an authoritative text.