Accessing IPFS stored files that can't be found

Hi All,

I just want to preface this question with the disclaimer that i know NOTHING about IPFS, i can’t code and whilst compared to the general population I’m probably intermediate in computing knowledge, in this sub i will be less than a beginner, so please go easy.

Without going into the long and overly complex reason why, I’ve used wayback machine to access a website which is no longer online. I’m trying to gain access to some images that were on the site. I opened the source code on the site through wayback machine and despite the images not displaying, i was able to see where the site was pointing to for them.

The address was https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/[imagecollectionidentifier]

The identifier was suffixed with ‘/1.png’ for image 1, ‘/2.png’ for image 2 and so on.

I pasted this into my address bar to get a 404 error.

Is it possible to recover access to a set of images if i wasn’t the person originally owning/hosting them? I think gateways publicly link to files but i have no knowledge of this and am not the original asset owner. My issue is I also have a link to the images that are now broken and have no way to resolve with the owner as they have disappeared.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

You best bet would be to run an IPFS node and try to pin the CID. If you run the node for long enough someone might come online with the data your looking for.