The Impermanent Internet

Remember when they used to warn you that anything you post online will forever be on the Internet? That bit of truth apparently only applies to specific types of information… After working on my blog over the past couple weeks, trying to update, manage and change online storage of media I’ve used in my posts, there’s a lot of stuff that I’ve posted that cannot be found anywhere… and this is media that I own/owned. It’s even worse when I post YouTube videos from other creators. They pod-faded and stopped paying for hosting and their stuff is gone, just gone.

Sometimes I can search for another copy of a lost video. I’d rather use a copy of the video that was posted by its creator, but I’m not above using video from user accounts with non-recognizable names (knowing that I might have to repeat this step every couple of years). Then there are videos, images and MP3s that I have no way of tracking down.

I prefer having one central location where my stuff is stored online… but maybe the fact that I’ve had over four versions of my current blog spread across a couple blog accounts and image storage accounts has been a godsend. And, of course I have multiple copies of any image/video/audio file of any personal worth on multiple local storage devices. But even with that much redundancy there’s a surprising amount of media stuff that is either gone or I can’t determine the identity of the missing media. Sadly, when all of this began over 20-years ago I wasn’t particularly careful with the name of the media files, too often keeping the meaningless “IMG_0000.HEIC” filename assigned by the recording device. Not going to find the image with a name like IMG_0000.HEIC. And way too often I would post the same image over and over again because in the beginning there wasn’t an easy way to double check if the image was already on the server. Having media with meaningless filenames didn’t help.

So, contrary to common wisdom, I’ve spent most of my time over the past many days trying to relocate or replace missing media on my blog posts. And sometimes I have to just leave a note with today’s date commenting that the link to the original media is broken and couldn’t be found. I probably should find a way to make sure that my stuff doesn’t cease to exist when there ’s no one around to pay for the yearly hosting fees (the whole reason I’ve been on this recent work journey, to reduce the hosting fee by moving my media storage). Ugh. Now I gotta figure out how I’m going to preserve my stuff past my own lifetime… which becomes shorter even as I work to regather my online literary legacy. So, I guess that’s another unanticipated deadline. Damn, impermanent Internet.

Tags: blogging, broken links, lost media, online media, saved for posterity