Do You Save Copies Of the Fic You Read?

[morgana_st]

I have a question for my fellow fanfic readers: do you save copies of stories as you read them? I've read some discussions lately in other fandoms where people have been adamant that the smartest thing to do when you read a story (or view a piece of fanart) that you like is to save it. Because you never know when the link will die or the author will take it down for whatever reason (they decide to go pro and therefore remove everything, they decide they hate all their early work, they no longer like the fandom, fandom drama, whatever) and it's just.... gone. We've all experienced the middle-of-the-night frustration of trying to track down a missing chapter through the Wayback Machine to no avail.

So some people say the only solution is to save absolutely everything to your hard drive. I've seen a suggestion to open a gmail account and email a copy of every story to oneself, because apparently they have a good tagging system as well as ample storage. Someone else suggested saving everything into a Word file. I had been trying to gradually get things entered into Delicious (and kicking myself for all the fic I read before I had my account) but while it's fun to play with the tags in Delicious if the links are dead I'm still unable to access the stories.

So...how do you guys handle this? Do you save fiction or do you cross your fingers and hope that it will hang around on the Internet somewhere?