@Delphince
I suppose it’s just me that finds them practical. I get your analogy, but yet these dead links have previously helped confirmed aliases, Wayback Machine searches, forum accounts, etc. Maybe it’s useful to only a handful of us and perhaps why it’s otherwise not worth the effort most of the time.

In any case, if I had extra information and it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to fetch it, I would definitely provide it.

Sorry if this is coming off a little long-winded. Thanks for the help either way.

At a glance, I mean, sure, more information = better, but when you bring in how to potentially use that information… A dead link to a dead account from an artist that changed their name—I don’t see how that has any practical use other than satisfying hollow curiosity, like discovering where the remote to the television you recycled disappeared to in the apartment you moved out of five years ago. Will that help you find your missing watch? No…no, not really, because all the circumstances are randomized again.

Indeed it does!

Yup same. I usually can’t expand the description box too, but you can still see the full description by viewing the page’s source code.

I see. I’d still do that to confirm the image’s original resolution, which it also does say in the page’s source code.

I don’t know about this. Personally I think providing any extra information where possible is always helpful for future pony fans. It might be an important lead next time they want to find another lost image like this one.

You know what? I’ll just re-upload the music file. Potentially save future-me from losing it again.

@Background Pony #F809
Something I failed to mention was the original video I was looking for had been removed from YouTube, which is what set me on course in the first place into hoping I’d downloaded it somewhere on an old hard drive. Les Friction - What You Need; someone had used this image as the background. Utterly perfect match; you should open both image and song to see what I mean.

Either way, extended descriptions don’t load in TWB, so if the name was credited there, it was lost, making me take the alternate route I did. I just followed your suggestion, and putting this original image into Google (as opposed to my screen cap) yielded a few more returns, including the song you mentioned.

I didn’t bother Wayback’ing the DA account because I’d already had the image by then, and I figure if someone is willing to delete their work, they forfeit the lip service of a dead source link, because they voluntarily tried to destroy it. The name was credit enough.

@Delphince
Again, nice work! I don’t know if we’re thinking of the same song, but mine was Oxygen - FritzyBeat hugs Almost Anyone. The artist was already listed in the description of that video. The image with the original link was found in this Wayback Machine snapshot of the deviantART gallery. Google image search surprisingly scored a hit for that small thumbnail. It wasn’t a Twitter link, but this post on JoyReactor’s MLP section which also has the full resolution.

Fun fact: a deviation’s comments section does not go away unless the artist disables it themselves. You can still see it here. The comments show that Cheriel/Fiarel speaks Russian, so it isn’t surprising that there is also an account on Tabun. Perhaps the reason for deactivation can be found there.

@Background Pony #F809
I dug through an old hard drive and found that I’d downloaded a YouTube song that used the image as a background. Did a cropped screen capture, plugged it into Google’s image search. That scored a hit with someone that had put it on their Twitter at full resolution, but uncredited. Lucky, because it was one of only two images that were retrievable.
As a similar return, there was also an image that was clearly an alternate version with Applejack. Checking that out, it gave me a YouTube video on Equestria Daily, and following that to the source, I got the artist name in the details as a DeviantArt link. Dead gallery on DA, but plugging that name into Derpibooru, it turned up as an old alias for the name I credited in the tags. That alt version with AJ also happened to be uploaded here under the new name.

So putting all that together, we’ve got this post.

Noticed you found the specific link to the image from before it was executed. I’m guessing you did a little work yourself and plugged the old alias into the Wayback Machine to dig up the DA before it was deactivated in 2014?

Nice work. Where did you find it?