Because it's something I've been grappling with for a while myself, I got curious about how other people save and store the fanfiction they read (or intend to read), either on- or offline. And since I just re-upped my paid time on dreamwidth, it looks like conditions are perfect for a poll! For these purposes, when I talk about "saving a story", I mean "putting it (or a link to it) in any physical, digital, or virtual space for your own personal access at a later date, for any reason". So:

( A poll! Your personal fanfiction curation habits: describe them to me! )

Obviously this poll is limited to my own experiences and knowledge, so I would dearly love to hear about the practices that work for you. Or practices that are no longer working for you! There's also the fact that I myself am exclusively a reader and not a writer of fanfiction. If you're a writer, does that affect your archiving habits? Do you handle your own fic differently? What about saving other fannish works, like art and podfic and vids and meta? I'm especially unfamiliar with fanart communities and their homes on the web, and with vids I very quickly run into the problem of limited disk space. So what do you do?

Here's how my current system is set up: every story I read that I ever want to lay my hands on again, I a) save in html format to my laptop (which subsequently gets backed up to an external drive) and b) bookmark in my delicious account. It's important to me to have both, since anything can disappear from the internet at any moment (sites go down, links break, C&D letters are served, authors pull their work, etc.), but a library in the cloud is, by definition and design, accessible a) to anyone b) from anywhere. Thus, in a perfect world I would have a perfectly redundant system consisting of local, offline electronic copies and the corresponding referral links to the online versions of those stories.

But (spoiler!) it isn't a perfect world, and this is how things actually shake out:

( How things actually shake out )