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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The internet is a collection of computers with data stored on hard drives somewhere. The computer may be mounted in a rack next to others in data center, but it functions similarly to a desktop machine with an attached enclosure of disk drives.
Not all old files still exist. The user accounts holding them might have been deleted, the owners may have moved on to other projects or the server might have suffered catastrophic data loss.
Data has to be intentionally backed up by sites like the Internet Archive. Software distributions may get mirrored by download sites. You might get more content available form Archive.org if you select another date. A major hub of personal websites called Yahoo Geocities got mirrored over at Oocities.org
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