Everything that’s ever been on the internet is still there, just hiding.
Thus spoke a wiser person than me. Well, as a non-CIA spy with god-level access to ALL of the internet, I want to find really old images and mp3s posted in the late 90s/early 2000s to sites that no longer exist. The Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org has allowed me to see tantalizing snapshots of old web pages, but where is all that old content now? Is there a better way to search for old images and audio? obv.
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Your problem is thinking of “the internet” as one homogenous thing, rather than what it really is: a decentralised collection of independently-operated computers and networks that happen to communicate with each other using established standards and protocols.
Any individual piece of data that is or was available on the internet is ultimately physically located on some storage media owned by some person or group. That may be the person who created it, it may be someone else who explicitly downloaded it, it may be some group who incidentally has a copy of it like Google or the Internet Archive.
But there’s no guarantee that anyone still has a copy (files get deleted, computers die), and if they do, that’s it’s still available online (people die, computers get disconnected, companies go bankrupt), accessible by everyone (and not locked behind someone’s private Dropbox, or on a site not indexed by search engines, aka the deep web) and that it can be easily found (obviously there is no search engine to find content not indexed by any search engine).
When people talk about anything you upload to the internet being there “forever”, what they mean is that once it’s there you can no longer control who has access to it or can make copies of it. It doesn’t mean that literally every piece of content that was ever uploaded is guaranteed to stay there forever, you need to take active measures to ensure that if that’s your goal.
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