Guide to backing up AO3 fics on the Wayback Machine
okay so on the interest of being able to link back to this instead of having to type it all over again the next time a friend asks:
yes, you CAN back up fic (and other websites in general) to the wayback machine, you don't have to be a specific profession or a member of the internet archive or anything
you can do this without an account, but you have extra options when you're saving a website using an internet archive account (saving ALL outlinks from that page, which is a huge time-saver; saving it to your web archive, which is useful when you want to look up the stuff you saved; etc). making an account is free.
specific things need to be taken into consideration when saving, such as whether a webpage requires login in order to enter. the wayback machine only saves a page exactly as it would show up to you if you were to open it on an anonymous tab right now with no extras installed (logged out, no saved cookies, stuff unclicked, etc) so you need to take this into consideration when saving stuff
why does this matter? because when it comes to ao3 fic, specifically, this poses some issues. at the risk of this post being nearly exclusively lists and bullet-points:
login-locked fics can't be saved to the web archive like this (please download them through ao3 itself if you'd like to save them as they are)
fics rated as explicit, mature, or not rated don't get saved properly if you use the normal fic link. they only get saved as the page where you confirm that you're willing to proceed unless you add this confirmation to the link you're saving (more on this below)
fics with more than one chapter don't get saved properly if you use the normal fic link. i see this happen a LOT with people who think they saved stuff but then only the first chapter was actually backed up. you also need to add a parameter to consider this to the link you're saving (more on this below). no, using the save all outlinks option won't help you here as the links to the next chapters aren't all indexed.
saving outlinks won't work if the fics listed in the page are explicit or multichapter, because you'll run into the same issues as in points 2 and 3. using the "save outlinks" option works when you're dealing with the page for a series where all the works are gen/teen oneshots. maybe twoshots, since ao3 now links to the latest chapter on the chapter count, but i haven't tested this yet.
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step-by-step guide to how to back up fic and deal with the pesky multichapter/rating issues below the cut:
1. get the fic link
you want the one that is formatted like below, with only the work ID listed in the link
https://archiveofourown.org/works/17007075
you can get this straight-up on oneshots, or right-click+"copy link" on the fic name when the fic is listed on an ao3 page (such as in the pages for bookmarks, series, or just in the plain fandom/ship tag). alternatively, if the link you have has anything else on it, such as:
you can just remove everything after the work ID so that the format is the same as in the first example.
2. edit the link
if the fic is a gen/teen oneshot, you can just leave the link as it is
if the fic is explicit/mature/not rated, add ?view_adult=true to the end of the link
if the fic is a multichapter, add ?view_full_work=true to the end of the link
if the fic is explicit/mature/not rated and a multichapter, add ?view_adult=true&view_full_work=true to the end of the link
you can just use the last one for any fics and it'll work! it's just more difficult to find on the wayback machine if you only have the original link to work with, so i try to keep it to the simplest version possible.
as an example, you'll end up with something like this for the last case:
the edited link you end up with is the one you'll use from now on in this tutorial!
3. check whether the link has already been saved on the web archive (optional)
if the fic was saved, say, yesterday, or the writer has vanished from the interwebz since like 2003, and everything looks to be in order, there's little point in saving it again unless there were major changes since (and PLEASE check if the only save wasn't just an error page instead of the page itself, sometimes this happens and it's heartbreaking when you only notice after the page is gone.)
you can check this by going to the main page of the web archive, entering the link, and then checking on the timeline for how many lines there are in it (if there are no saves at all, they will ask you if you want to save the page). for the fic we're using as an example, someone appears to have saved it in 2021. click on that line, and then on the calendar below (where there'll presumably be either a blue or a green bubble around the date in which someone tried to back it up. other colours are no bueno):
green bubbles/links indicate a redirect. this is not particularly worrying by itself: it happens, for example, when the link is being redirected from the work ID-only format to the ID/chapters/chapter-ID format. but it can also be a redirect to a warning, for example. click on one of those timestamps and check whether the fic shows up as you expect it to. (once you have the page for a snapshot, you can just paste your next links in there to check if they exist instead of doing this all over again.)
for example, in the case of this particular fic, only the third chapter appears to have been saved. weird! you definitely don't want the only back-up of it to be this one, so it's time to move on to the next step.
4. save the fic!!!!
go to the wayback machine save page. paste the link. if you have an account and want to keep the saved website at hand, check the "save in my web archive" option.
whether you want to save error pages (for example, in case ao3 is having server issues, or for archival/historical reasons) or not is up to you, but i prefer to uncheck the box because it's usually more visible if there was an issue. below is the page of a 404 page i tried to save with the box unchecked:
and here is an attempt for another 404 page with the box checked:
the second example saved the error page only, and can mislead you into thinking that the fic was properly archived when it was, in fact, not.
DO NOT CLOSE THE PAGE UNTIL THE ARCHIVING IS DONE OR UNLESS THEY TELL YOU YOU CAN! this latter case usually happens when there's a lot of strain in the archive and the back-ups are happening with some delay, but in general you want to keep the page open so you can see the status of your save.
YES, it's slow as fuck, you're just gonna have to deal with it. i usually have 3-4 pages open when i'm working on saving several fics at a time. be patient. do other stuff meanwhile. i usually do this at the same time i'm updating my bookmarks with the fic title/author/summary/link in case the fic gets deleted and i have no clue which one it was anymore, so i have a pretty steady "copy link->edit link->save fic->update bookmark for that fic->repeat" workflow going on.
5. save the link you used!
bestie. i'm pleading with you. save the fic link somewhere. any! fic link! for that fic! even the original will do! any link that you can reverse-engineer into the one you want! because good fucking luck finding the save you did when you no longer know how to get there, even if you save it on your own web archive (i have a couple thousand websites saved on mine so it's like finding a needle in a haystack).
the web archive does not neatly save the page name so that you can search it easily, so you ABSOLUTELY need the link for the fic or you're likely done for💀
you have a couple options here! place the link in your ao3 bookmark directly, if you have the fic saved on there. if you're the kind of person who bookmarks directly on their browser, go for it, i guess? (but keep a backup of your bookmarks somewhere). create an excel with the fic data in a column or two and their corresponding links on the following one. it's up to you! just save it somewhere.
preferably, save a downloaded copy of the fics you love, too, instead of solely relying on the web archive, but that's a lecture for another day.
6. bonus round: saving series!
also adaptable for saving works by a specific author - the essence of it is that you want every page you'd need to navigate to in order to reach the rest of the works. for an author, this would likely be their main page -> their works page (or their [works in specific fandom] page) -> every page within that -> the works within each page.
this is where the outlinks are your best friend.
get the series link (the format is something like https://archiveofourown.org/series/2930166).
open the save page on the web archive.
if the works are all mature/explicit/not rated and/or contain more than two chapter each, don't bother checking "save outlinks". if the series has a large amount of gen/teen works and they're only oneshots and twoshots, check "save outlinks". you'll save time doing this instead of backing each of them up individually, but please verify that the second chapters of the twoshots have indeed been saved.
save the series page. save also the link to the series page: from this one you can then navigate to the works you save within it.
now individually save each of the works within that series that you want to keep (and that you haven't covered in point 6.3) by using points 1-4 of the larger fic-centric tutorial.
oh, also... the DeviantArt portion of my EDM fic archival project is probably going to be done by the end of next week if not tuesday. it's going really fast. should i release the DeviantArt portion before i move on to the LJ+DW, Tumblr, & Misc. sections?
Library has a scanner that bulk-scans and is free to use. I decided to scan in my collection of fanfic I printed out when i was a freshman in college. About a third of them have been deleted from the internet and I a worried I’m going to lose them in a move or something.
They’re on a thumbdrive now, which means BACKUPS EVERYWHERE.
Next task is to get some text recognition software to go through and convert the pdf’s.
Task after that is to see if I can find any of the author’s online and see if they want a hard-bound copy of their fic, because jfc printed out, some of these fics are larger than my accounting textbooks.
Many of the links for the master list of fics don't lead anywhere. Maybe you could fix this?
Hello anon! We have been trying to archive the fulltext of fics posted to Tumblr on this blog to avoid losing fic when an author either deletes their blog or changes URLs, but it’s a slow process. We will be attempting to fix it when we get the chance.
