Backing up is time consuming, it's true. Just trust me on this one, it's an hour well spent in guarding against the fateful day when you will wake up to discover that everything is gone - just...gone. (The last time my PC died, I almost cried...literally.)

Backing Up Your Stories
Odds are, if you read our TOS or our FAQ's, you probably have a copy of your stories saved somewhere on your PC, and that's a good thing. If you don't, keep reading and, even if you do, now is a good time to drag them out and make sure they are the most up-to-date versions of your stories. There's nothing more tragic than realizing that your PC versions are littered with typos and un-beta read in your hour of need.

For those of you that ignored our frequent warnings, there's still hope for you, and backing up isn't as hard as you would think.

Things It's Very Important To Back Up:
- chapter summaries
- chapter titles
- chapter content (including HTML)
- story rating
- story warnings
- main characters
- main pairings
- era
- genres

Now, of course, there are a lot of ways to do this and you are welcome to do it whatever way you like, but my favorite method is to use the Print Story page to grab my entire story in one fell swoop. First, I like to login to my account and visit Edit/Delete Stories. Then, for each of my stories, visit the Edit Story page and copy down all of my story info into a Word document - rating, warnings, characters, the summary, etc. This is going to make getting your story revalidated a lot easier. Forgetting to include a warning and having broken images are some pretty common rejection reasons, so having the information ready is a must. To get out without saving any accidental changes you might have made, just hit the back button.

From there, go back to Your Account and hit the Show My Page button. Open up the story you would like to back-up, in this case I'm using one of my stories - Extempore (M) as an example. Visit your first chapter and, in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, you should see a little button that looks not entirely unlike a printer. Clicking it will take you to a page that looks much like this one. If your story is a one-shot, you're all set. If, however, you have more than one chapter, you need to click the Print All Chapters button on the right-side of the page.

Once you're all set there, just Select All (CTRL-A) and Copy (CTRL-C). Then, open up a new document (Word, notepad, whatever you like to use) and Paste (CTRL-V).

And you're done!

Well, you should probably double check to make sure that it's all there but, for all intents and purposes, just save the file (CTRL-S) and you're all set.

See, that wasn't too hard!

Backing Up Your Reviews
You don't have to back-up your reviews. Even if the archive does decide to eat them and you have a back-up copy, you can't put them back so, if you do decide to back-up your reviews, understand that it is only for your personal viewing and the joys of posterity. If, however, you do want to back them up so that you might view them later when you're old, feeble and regretting the fact that you became an accountant instead of pursuing your dream of writing fiction, there are a few ways to do it, and neither is perfect.

Copy/Paste
If you aren't very techno savvy and my saying "View Source" means nothing to you, this is the way to go. On your author page, click the reviews link next to your story(s) (if you're using my page as an example, you would want to click the 90 next to Extempore.) From there, you should see a page that looks something like this. Using your mouse, select all of your reviews - or, if you're in a hurry, you can select the entire contents of the page using Select All (CTRL-A) – and copy (CTRL-C) them. Then, just paste (CTRL-V) into a new document and save (CTRL-S).

Depending on the number of reviews you have, you may need to repeat this process on multiple pages.

This method works relatively well, but the resulting text document can be a little messy as all of the site management links (respond - report for abuse, etc) still appear on the page and can make the formatting a little wonky. Nevertheless, it's quick and easy.

View Source
If you want to retain the page formatting, and even view them on the sites current skin, you can do so using the "View Source" feature on your web browser. Follow the steps shown above (visit your author page and click on the reviews for your story) then right click anywhere on the page and select View Source from the context menu. A new window should appear with the page HTML. Simply Save As (CTRL-S). Remember, depending on the number of reviews you have, you may need to do this for multiple pages to get all of your reviews.

The files will be saved as HTML documents and, in the future, when you want to look back on them, clicking the document on your harddrive will open the page up in your web browser. Just remember, while it looks like an internet page, it's not "online" and links will not work, images will disappear, etc

Backing Up Your Favorites
We all love the Favorite Author and Favorite Story functions, right? But if your account is deleted or the system is eaten, your favorites may be lost, so it can be a good idea to have a back-up of your favorite authors and stories.

This is ultra easy to do. Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox users can simply visit the author pages of their Favorite Authors and click CTRL-D to add them to their PC bookmarks. The same can be done with well liked stories.


It isn't exactly quick and it isn't exactly easy, but you spent a lot of time on your stories and no matter how many reads or reviews you've gotten, you should be proud of your work. Protect it against server gremlins and save, save, save!