How to Keep Your Online Writing from Disappearing Forever

While the notion that “the Internet is forever” persists, it can also seem like it has been written in water. If you’re an Internet-based creative, the company that publishes your writing or displays an online gallery of your work may suddenly go out of business (see: Gawker or Game Informer), migrate content management systems, or simply unpublish older work. In this case, the article you researched for a month, the story you carefully constructed, or the photo gallery you painstakingly assembled may, at that moment, become unavailable forever. And if you placed a link to your work on a blog or social network, that link has now become useless.

So what do you do? You can save a PDF of each of your work to a local drive, an online storage service, or your preferred productivity app. You can create your own website to showcase your favorite works. You can use paid tier of bookmarking services like Premium Pocket or Raindrop Pro, which automatically saves copies of websites you bookmark.

Or you can archive and/or exhibit your work through a service created for this purpose. These archiving services offer a place where you can display some or all of your work to potential fans or employers and even (for a price) automatically find and save your work for you.

In this article, I’ll focus on resources for writers and other text-based creatives. There are also resources for photographers and other visual artists, such as Flickr and 500 pixels. We will cover this separately in the future.

THE Internet Archive Wayback Machine has been archiving web pages since 1996, and if you’ve been putting your work online that long — or longer — there’s a good chance you’ll find it somewhere in the archive. However, not everything has been archived and archived pages can be removed if site owners request them.

You can request a specific page to be archived using a browser extension (for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, iOS or Android). The extension saves the page to a file, allowing you to access it later, even if the original disappears. However, since the site editor may, as mentioned, request that the file be removed, you can use the Wayback Machine to find pages you may have missed and archive them using a safer method.

Additionally, at the time of this writing, it was possible that the Chrome extension itself might disappear – when I last looked, a notification on the download page said: “This extension may soon no longer be supported because it does not follow the best practices. practices for Chrome extensions.” (Part, no doubt, of the change in Google’s extension specifications.) There are other, though less practical, ways to save your work to the file, detailed in a blog written in 2017.

The Wayback Machine is free to use, although you can donate if you choose.

Author is an old app used by writers to preserve their writing. (Note: I’ve been using Authory for several years, ever since one of the publications I wrote for decided to pull its archive from the internet and a colleague told me about the app.) Authory will automatically back up links to your material along with the text real, scouring the online publications you specified; Because it automatically collects everything you’ve written for these publications, you don’t have to worry about losing any work. Authory also archives videos, podcasts, and individual posts on social media or emails.

You can also use Authory as a portfolio to showcase your content to others. By default, people who click on an article link in your portfolio are sent to the original source, but you can also choose to have them read the article in your Authory backup – very useful if that source no longer exists.

Free Plan: Maximum 10 items, no automatic import

Paid plans: The Standard plan ($15/month or $144/year) includes unlimited items, automated import of past and future items, searchable content, and more. The Professional plan ($24/month or $216/year) adds custom domain support, Zapier app, and increased update frequency.

Free Trial: 14 days of Standard or Pro plan

Despite the name, Newspaper Portfolio touts its ability to be used by almost any creative who wants to showcase their work, including visual artists such as photographers and videographers. The emphasis (as you can guess from the name) is more on creating a portfolio site than archiving, although if you subscribe to the Pro or Unlimited plan it will automatically back up saved articles, create an archive of screenshots and will allow you to import older articles.

And Journo Portfolio offers lots of features to individualize that portfolio: you can choose a theme for your home page, and then tweak that theme by adding blocks of content types, including images (with gallery if you prefer), quotes, maps, signatures and a wide variety of other features. Your Unlimited plan even allows you to sell your art or other products from your website.

Free plan: A homepage with your name in the URL along with 10 portfolio items

Paid plans: The Plus plan ($8/month or $60/year) offers a five-page website with 50 portfolio items. The Pro plan ($12/month or $96/year) adds the ability to store 1,000 portfolio items and article backups, as well as up to two collaborators, automatic article imports, and more. The Unlimited plan ($18 per month or $168/year) offers unlimited pages, portfolio items, contributors, and more.

Free Trial: A seven-day trial of the Plus plan at sign-up

Coniferformerly called Webrecorder, is a web archiving service maintained by Rhizomea non-profit arts organization. This service works a little differently than Authory or Journo Portfolio, which archives screenshots or PDFs of your articles, but may lose links and other interactive parts in the process. Instead, Conifer saves your pages as clickable “sessions” – including viable links – and organizes them into collections. According to Conifer, “viewers of a collection must be able to repeat any action during access that was performed during capture”. You can keep your collection private or create a public listing of specific items in a collection to create a portfolio.

Conifer feels like a work in progress. It’s not as simple to master as Authory or Journo Portfolio and it doesn’t offer any kind of automated saving, but its free plan makes it a viable alternative, especially since it lets you save as many items as you can fit in 5GB of space, while the free plans Free Authory and Journo Portfolio limits you to just 10 items.

Free plan: 5GB of storage

Paid plans: For $20 per month, you get 40GB of storage and the option to add more for $5/month for 20GB. For an annual payment of $200, you get the same 40GB, along with the option to add 20GB for $50 per year.