I like this term “digital archaeology”. I find myself saying it a lot when dealing with “only” 20 year old database data in my day job. Apparently, but not surprisingly, it’s a real thing[1]!
There's long been a saying that "Once it's out there (on the Internet), it's forever," but I used to save links in a Microsoft Word document, and I went through them a few years later and almost none of them worked anymore. The years in which they were saved was 2006 to 2009, and the year I went through them was 2012. The links were from MySpace (which totally overhauled the entire site and all content), Facebook (where users had deleted their profiles or pictures), Tumblr (where bloggers rename their blogs, which change the URL, or they wipe them clean, or delete their blogs), YouTube (tons of videos and whole accounts have been deleted because of copyright infringement, whether by the account holder or by YouTube itself), Blogspot (same, but also that some bloggers made their blogs private, perhaps to prevent spam-comments or trolling), Yahoo articles (which I see Yahoo deletes after some time), Style.com (Vogue magazine's website of all runway shows, which are now on Vogue.com instead, with a different URL structre), and dozens of other websites that don't exist anymore.
I think the statement about "stuff that's out there" really only applies to famous or public people, where leaked and/or damning photos or videos are quickly copied, saved, and rehosted by websites all over the world, including Twitter, Pinterest, and other platforms. For instead, while Google Images fastidiously won't show you the hacked photos of "Jennifer Lawrence naked," as Google sought to avoid a $100M lawsuit [0], Bing Images, once you turn off Safe Search, shows plenty of sites that host the pictures, with most frequent such site being a German-based one called "OhFree," but there are at least 3 Blogspot sites as well, I suppose ironically.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_archaeology