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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It’s not correct that everything that’s ever been on the internet is still there. Although it is generally true that most things of note on the internet do get archived one way or the other – either intentionally by services like the Wayback Machine, or unintentionally by people downloading and then re-uploading that same content to a different place – at the end of the day everything that’s on the internet does need to exist as a file on a computer somewhere, and if those files are deleted, then it’s gone. What you’re seeing on the Wayback machine is hosted by the wayback machine and that is probably the best way to find that content. Moreover, there’s probably a lot of internet content saved on computers that were once connected to the internet, but now aren’t, meaning that those files are effectively “gone” as far as an internet user is concerned – though they still do exist somewhere they’re “hiding” in that they would be impossible to access unless you foudn the physical computer they’re saved on
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