The internet is forever, except when itâs not.

UmâŚ. no. Thereâs no magical âscramble codeâ to recover anything.
But that does raise a very interesting conundrum. We often say âthe internet is foreverâ, while at the same time saying, âBe sure to back up, because once you delete it, itâs gone.â
The ways of both the internet and deletion are more complex than most people realize. While these two statements appear to be diametrically opposed, theyâre both very true â often at exactly the wrong time.
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Deleting or retrieving from the internet
- Trying to hide things online often only brings more attention. Itâs called the Streisand Effect.
- Anything you post can be copied, and likely is being copied within moments, by search engines, archives, and other third parties.
- Sharing information online, even with privacy restrictions, puts you at the mercy of those you share with.
- Services that back up their data make copies when they do, which includes your data on that service.
- Once posted, itâs pragmatically impossible to delete all copies of your data.
- You canât access the remaining copies, but they could still come back to haunt you.
The public internet &Â Barbra Streisand
As many have discovered, one of the fastest ways to spread a rumor is to call it a secret. Thatâs true in life, but nowhere is it more true than on the internet.
Just ask Barbra Streisand. Thereâs a reason thereâs something now called âthe Streisand effectâ.
In 2003, she attempted to prevent photographs of her home from being published on the internet. This drew more attention, rather than less, to the images. It prompted people to copy and re-post the photos elsewhere, again and again and again. Indeed, the Wikipedia article that describes âthe Streisand effectâ includes the picture she originally attempted to suppress. Thereâs simply no way she or anyone else could find and delete all the copies that were made of that photo, and continue to be made to this day. Indeed, any attempt to do so would probably just spur another round of copying and re-posting.
We see this all the time with information posted publicly that is later removed or altered. Be it a tweet, a photo, a database, or something else, usually someone, somewhere, has a copy of its original. On discovering the attempts to rewrite or delete history, theyâre quick to call shenanigans on the effort by posting the original as proof. Depending on the perceived relevance of the information, the original may be re-posted once or many times in many places, making its removal from the public internet as impossible as removing the photo of Ms. Streisandâs home.1
This is one reason we say âthe internet is foreverâ. Anything you post publicly can be copied. Thereâs no easy way to know by who, or by how many, but you can never assume that the number of copies is zero. Never. Once itâs on the public internet, you lose all control over it the instant that someone makes a copy.
Your posts are being copied
OK, so youâre not Babs2. To the best of your knowledge, no one cares about your tweets, photos, or whatever you care to post online. No oneâs making copies of what you post publicly.
Youâre wrong.
While itâs likely that you as an individual arenât that interesting, that doesnât mean what youâre posting online isnât being copied, and probably quite quickly. Youâre âinterestingâ in the sense that youâre a user of Twitter, Google Photos, Flickr, or whatever service you use. Those sites are mirrored regularly. Why?

- Search engines like to keep local, cached copies in case the site goes offline.
- Understanding how to âspider the web,â as itâs called, is something computer science students learn by writing spiders that pick a target and mirror it. Others just do it for fun.
- The Internet Archive attempts to keep copies of all public websites to preserve our digital history. Â (Pictured to the right, my companyâs website as of 2003.)
- Many sites exist specifically to mirror other sites (or portions of other sites). Pick a prominent politician on Twitter, for example, and I can pretty much guarantee you thereâs a site keeping copies of that personâs tweets.
And thatâs before we even consider corporations, malicious agents, and governments copying public information for their records, analysis, and uses unknown.
Is something youâve posted in there? Probably. Will it matter someday? Thereâs no way to know. I personally publish a lot, but I donât expect it to be a problem.
I hope Iâm right.
Sharing is copying
I keep using the phrase âpublic internetâ because itâs an important distinction many people fail to keep in mind. Public is public, and as weâve seen, public must be considered to be âforeverâ.
So we ratchet up our privacy settings, restricting who is allowed to access our stuff, or perhaps only emailing certain things to certain people. We keep it âprivateâ â or so we think.
Still, we remain at the mercy of everyone with whom we choose to share our data. Each could be copying what we give them access to, intentionally or otherwise. On top of that, they could have really bad security; should their accounts or computers be compromised, whatever we share with them could be in the hands of a hacker in moments.
While that last scenario is not very likely (unless youâre a âhigh-value targetâ in the hackerâs eyes, and heâs used your friends to get access to you), it underscores something that is vital to understand: every time you share information with someone, youâre giving them a copy, and youâre giving them the ability to make more copies, and perhaps even post one of those copies publicly.
Sharing and exchanging data over the âprivateâ internet might not seem quite as private, since there really is no âprivateâ internet at all.
Backing up is copying
The internet is nothing more than a collection of computers that store data and know how to talk to each other. When you use a service like Twitter, send email, upload a photo, or even post a comment on a website like Ask Leo!, that information is stored on a computer not unlike your own3. Those services all take steps to back up the data they contain (hopefully like you do).
Backing up makes a copy of all their data â including all of your data.
Even if youâre the only one using an internet-hosted service â perhaps your email, cloud storage, online password vault, or who-knows-what â thereâs a good chance the service provider is regularly backing up their servers in case something goes wrong. In fact, we hope thatâs exactly what they do.
How long do they keep the backups? Theyâre not saying. It could be moments or years. But itâs possible that whatever youâve shared online or stored online for yourself, has been backed up somewhere, somehow, in some way. Thatâs yet another copy of your data thatâs effectively impossible for you to erase â which brings us to the reason for all this âinternet is foreverâ kind of talk.
Deleting doesnât delete all
You delete an email. You delete a file from your cloud storage. You delete a photo from your social media account. You delete a tweet. As you can see by now, regardless of exactly what that looks like to you, itâs very likely youâve deleted only one of many copies of your data.
Yet you canât get it back. Once you delete it, itâs gone.
The âcatchâ is, youâve deleted the copy under your control. Perhaps itâs the copy most obviously visible to everyone, but itâs probably not the only copy.
Unless you have access to those other copies, or youâve kept a copy on your own machine, youâve lost your data. The online services generally will not restore from their backups (the backups are to recover from their issues, not yours). Hackers certainly arenât going to share with you, even if you can track them down (theyâre probably overseas anyway). And the NSA isnât going to respond to your request to restore your data from their backups (assuming theyâve been watching you, of course).
This is why we say âOnce you delete it, itâs gone.â There may be other copies, but there is likely no way to access them.
If it was public, maybe youâll get lucky and find a copy on The Internet Archive; Iâve recovered an occasional website or web page from there. If it was private, perhaps someone with whom you shared it still has a copy. If it was yours and yours alone, and it was stored in only one place, then you werenât backed up. Itâs likely gone forever, regardless of how many actual copies there might be out there somewhere.
Unless you have sufficient resources (read: money), a compelling reason, an attorney, and a court order to force an online service to retrieve it, whatever you deleted is gone.
And then it gets weird.
Deleted isnât deleted, except when it is
Whatever you deleted is gone from your grasp. You deleted it, and you canât recover it â unless you had a backup, of course.
But itâs not really gone, now, is it? As frustrating as it is, copies continue to exist: system backups, at a minimum, and possibly archive/mirror copies, research copies, malicious copies, and more.
All out of your reach and out of your control.
There are only two things you can count on, really:
- You canât get it. (âOnce you delete it, itâs gone.â)
- It could still come back to haunt you. (âThe internet is forever.â)
The solutions are equally simple:
- Back up everything
you keep online. - Donât put anything online that might âhauntâ you, for whatever definition of âhauntâ you care to assume.
These are exciting times, to be sure, but theyâre complex and often frustrating times, as well.
Do this
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Footnotes & References
1: In an exceptionally interesting and geeky note, the technology underlying BitCoin, called âblock chainâ, was used to âIrrevocably Mirrorâ 20,000 lectures before a legal issue forced the University hosting them to remove them from its site.
2: If English is not your native language, âBabsâ is one of the many short forms of âBarbaraâ. Itâs not common, and Iâm guessing Ms. Streisandâs not a fan of it. But once published, itâs out there. Forever.
3: Seriously. They might have more cores, more RAM, more disk space, or more whatever, and they might run different operating systems (or not), but the majority of the internet runs on computers that arenât that different from the desktop computer nearest you.
Since the NSA is supported by our tax dollars, they belong to us and should make their backup services available to us đ .
Sadly, doing so would also admit that those backups exist. đ
Then theyâd have to kill you, as the old line went đ
Interesting, because in my business I am often required to sign NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) that are obviously drawn up by lawyers who have no idea how the internet works. I am often required, after completing a project, to âreturn all documents and irrevocably delete all copiesâ, despite the fact that I am also required to properly back up everything, and all documents are sent to and from clients by email. Much of my work is done on the cloud, furthermore. It always amuses me that the lawyers who draft these NDAs seem to think that âreturningâ a digital document means that I only have âcopiesâ left, as if they behave like paper originals.
Remember, these are the same people that insist on a footer in emails that says (in effect) âif youâre not the person intended, this email is confidential and you should forget everything you readâ. Or something like that. đ
They seem to be forgetting the Streisand effect đ
Trying to cover a story up brings more attention to that story.
I first encountered the notion of âcloudâ (I detest this term) storage when I installed Microsoft Office 2010. I asked myself then whether I felt like having Uncle Billâs minions perusing my work, and elected to not use it. Since âcloudâ = Internet, and Internet is constantly and repeatedly backed up (We live in a digital landfill), my stuff would be âout thereâ and out of my control, save for whatever level of security was applied by the storage entity. Choosing storage is a different level of trust than choosing software. I learned to manage my files in an old-school manner, and I consider a thumb drive a perfectly acceptable replacement for âcloudsâ.
There are programs which can prevent people from seeing what you have stored on the âcloudâ. I use Cryptomator which uses military grade encryption. Can it eventually be cracked? Possibly, but at great time and expense, and seriously, Iâm not that interesting.
Just remember, if you use email AT ALL, youâre using cloud storage. đ
The Internet Archive isnât all itâs cracked up to be, itâs mostly a snapshot of what a site looked like at a certain point in time and most of the links are long dead. Whether or not you can locate the information again is a matter of luck. This is obvious with commercial websites, who would not be keeping up outdated information unless it were a matter of historical importance. The current website represents the companyâs newest and most pertinent data for the purpose of creating transactions. If the data or elements were to be stored for later use, say nostalgic or an anniversary celebration then they would probably be stored offline or recreated from classic documents.
One time someone wanted me to recreate an old website they had created and let slip into oblivion by not renewing the URL and letting their server contract lapse. I was able to register the URL as if it were new and I got about 90% of the content restored from the Wayback machine of the Internet Archive.
There is a variation of this rule which I find useful : if you find something interesting on the Internet, and you think you might need it later, save it immediately to a place you control, such as your computer. Donât count on search engines to retrieve it later. Because, in all likeliness, you wonât be able to.
I say this from experience. Once upon a time, search engines (all right, Google) had that uncanny capability to immediately find whatever you were looking for. However obscure. This time is long gone.
Unless youâre looking for things everybody else is also looking for, meaning gossip about the latest news, the meaning of a word, or something that obvious, itâs likely you will need a lot of filters and attempts to retrieve that Web page you know exists (because youâve seen it a few years ago), or you wonât be able to.
Not counting active censorship of some pages or media by Google (or other search engines).
Thatâs why browsers have bookmarks or sometimes called favorites. If you forget to save the bookmark and want to go back to an article, it will likely be found in browser history. Some people clear history and cookies because they think it gives them more privacy. It really doesnât as those are only deleted from the browser but your ISP and others like Google etc. still have a record of your web history.
Iâve spent literally my entire life as a mindless consumer, and have just here recently been opening the hood on the technology that dominates my life. Iâm blown away. Not that this is simple stuff by any means (though you explanation is), but Iâm shocked to find that itâs FAR more simple than I thought it was. I was basically imagining magic, but this is all like common sense-style stuff.
Thanks Leo,
A correlary to Murphyâs law as regards to the Web: If you need it, it will be gone. If you need it gone, it will remain forever.