CodeshareArchiving Minecraft skins before they disappear
A skin exists until it is replaced, and then it is gone from everywhere. Hundreds of thousands are kept because nobody else keeps them.
When a Minecraft player changes their skin, the old one stops existing. There is no version history: the previous texture is simply no longer served to anyone. The same is true of capes.
Why keep them
Partly because people ask. A skin is someone's identity in the game over years, and the one they used in 2019 cannot be recovered from anywhere once it has changed.
Partly because it makes other things possible: recognising a returning player, showing how a profile has changed, spotting accounts that share a texture. All of those need a record of what was there before.
Store the image once
Skins repeat enormously. Default textures, popular community skins and outright copies mean the same image turns up thousands of times. Keying on the content rather than on the player collapses that: identical textures become one stored object with many references.
It also answers "has this changed?" cheaply, which matters because the honest answer is almost always no.
Only what was already public
Worth stating plainly: this archives textures that are publicly served for public profiles. It is a record of something that was already visible to anyone, kept after the source stopped serving it.
Data with no archive has a deletion date you do not control.