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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/milanove on 2023-08-15 03:41:46+00:00.
I've come to accept two core truths of data archival:
(1) All data posted online is ephemeral. There's no guarantee the content you see today will be there tomorrow. Your favorite song, video, or website that you've visited everyday for ten years may suddenly disappear without warning tomorrow, never to be re-uploaded. I think this is the reason most of us here hoard data.
(2) The internet does have limits on how far it can reach. You have to accept that not everything has been uploaded to the public internet, and there's no guarantee it ever will be. There's absolute gold mines of rare media out there (obscure movies and TV shows, rare interviews, books, etc) sitting in someone's hard drives, never to see the light of day online.
I used to find this annoying and disappointing. If I have a 720p copy of a video, could there be someone out there that has a never-before-seen 1080p or 4k copy they never uploaded? However, I've since come to find a sense of solace and mystery in this over the years. I take solace in the fact that the file I'm looking for probably exists out there somewhere; I find mystery in wondering where it is and who has it.
It's intriguing to think that there exists enormous private collections of obscure niche media out there somewhere, which are simply not connected to the public web. Data that exists, but cannot be searched, collated, and archived by others. For example, people's personal hard drives or cloud storage.
A notable example:
Just two years ago someone uploaded a never-before-seen video of the Techno Viking taken on the same day as the original viral video. They were just sitting on that VHS tape for 20 years.