#archival tools

Ever gone looking for an old fic you loved, only to find it's disappear and is now lost forever? Yeah, me too - my first fanfic loss was at the tender age of 14, when the beloved and award-winning Pirates in the Fellowship was taken down while I was still in the middle of reading it. One second I was reading about Captain Jack Sparrow helping out at the Battle of Helm’s Deep, the next second I’d clicked the Next Chapter button only to find an error screen.

That was my first experience with the hard truth that, while the internet is forever, fanworks certainly aren’t. If you’ve never lost an old fave, you’re either incredibly lucky, very new to fandom, or don’t read fanfic. Fanfiction gets deleted every day for all sorts of reasons - maybe a TOS violation, maybe bullying, maybe the writer got embarrassed at their high school hobby and deleted their archive. In the case of Pirates in the Fellowship, the writer wanted to edit and repost the story, and did eventually do so - three years later.

But the majority of deleted fic is never going to come back, and we can’t expect writers to just...not delete things. (Though on AO3, we can hope that the writers will at least opt to orphan their fics instead.) There’s really no way to prevent it from happening, so the next best thing is to take precautions and save your faves while they’re still up. Fans have been doing this for decades - back in the day, folks used to copy/paste entire fics into a word document to print them out, and you can find stories on tumblr of fics that only survived because of that.

But it’s the year 2018, and now we have way better ways to archive our favorite fanworks!

AO3

Archive of Our Own is, by and far, the easiest place to download fic from - it’s literally built into the website.

All you have to do is click the Download button, choose which kind of file you want to save the fic as, and where on your device you want to save it. Just a few quick clicks, and the entire story gets saved!

I usually save fic as a PDF. MOBI and EPUB are e-reader files. HTML is similar to saving as a webpage.

For more info on downloading from AO3, check out their Downloading Fanworks FAQ.

FanFictionDownloader

So what about all those sites that don’t have a built-in downloader? Which is, of course, basically every other major archive out there. Enter FanFictionDownloader, a super-easy-to-use third-party tool that downloads the fic for you.

FanFictionDownloader works on a number of popular sites, including FanFiction.Net and FictionPress.Net. It also has a wide array of output options - you can download fic as a PDF, MOBI, or EPUB, and also as a text document or several other document types that I don’t actually recognize. Check out their Features page for more details.

After you’ve downloaded FanFictionDownloader, all you have to do is open the program, copy/paste the link of the fic you want to download, choose the file output type, and download it.

There’s other tools out there as well, but AO3′s built-in download button and FanFictionDownloader both cover my needs nicely so I’ve never tested any others. If you’re only downloading from the big sites, you might find you don’t need anything else.