First thing: Yes, I’ve checked the Wayback Machine.

There were a bunch of websites I went to when I was younger that are no longer up for one reason or another. I assumed everything on them (that hasn’t be archived by the Wayback Machine) was gone forever. However, while watching this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77Mag2pykDw (~2h 17min in), he mentions how this person got videos off of these deleted Viacom websites. I realize this method might not work for everything, but I want to at least try.

I, of course, have no idea how. I first thought about figuring out where these websites used to be hosted using things like DNSDumpster and SecurityTrails, and snagging the IP address to see what I could get back as a response using Python, but many of these websites existed (and went down) before any of these websites started.

I realize this is a broad question, so to narrow it down to a single case: There is a website that’s been archived on the Wayback Machine, but it hasn’t been archived completely and a lot of stuff is missing. I might have just been doing it wrong, but searching through the page source, I didn’t find any kind of IP address. The websites been down for ~20 years at this point, so neither SecurityTrails or DNSDumpster have any kind of reference to its old IP address (The domain is back up for sale, so there’s IP addresses for that).

My question is thusly: How could I try and get all the data once hosted on that website? I realize the answer is probably “We need more details”, so, follow up question, what should my next steps be in actually getting more of those details.

The goal would be retrieving all the data that was once available on the website. I realized that that’s pretty unlikely, but I’d be satisfied with managing to get even a sliver more than what’s already available through the Wayback Machine.

Any suggestions on what my next steps should be would be greatly appreciated! I’m okay with learning how to do complicated things for this (I really want those old forum posts), I just don’t even know where to start.