Fanworks Offline Backup Plan
A calm, repeatable ritual for keeping your stories, bookmarks, and reading lists safe outside any single platform.
For fanfiction writers and archivists: a step-by-step plan to export your works, bookmarks, and reading lists into durable offline copies before the next outage.
Install it in 3 steps
No sign-up. No CLI tools. Pick your AI, copy one line, paste it over.
Prefer doing it yourself? Buy the skill ($4.99), download the ZIP from your checkout confirmation, unzip it into the directory shown above, restart your AI session — same result. Already bought it? Your AI assistant can download it for you.
What's inside
One SKILL.md (the playbook) + one starter template. A preview:
Fanworks Offline Backup Plan
The idea in one paragraph
When a platform your community lives on goes down - as the Archive of Our Own did on October 29, 2026 - the difference between panic and calm is a backup you made before the lights went out. This skill builds a repeatable offline backup ritual for fanworks: your own stories, your bookmarks, and the reading lists you would hate to lose, stored in formats that do not depend on any single site.
What it is built on
- The Archive of Our Own, run by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) since 2007, hosts more than 18 million fanworks for about 11 million registered users.
- On October 29, 2026, OTW took the site down for "maintenance" and confirmed on October 30 that it was responding to a security incident; the outage was expected to last at least two weeks and up to four.
- OTW later confirmed no fanworks were deleted and that bookmarks, kudos, and works remained safe - but during the outage, readers who had not saved their favorites had no way to reach them.
Workflow
- Inventory your footprint (input: your account profiles -> output: a written inventory). List every place your work and reading life lives: published works, drafts, bookmarks, reading history, and comment threads you care about.
- Choose durable formats (input: the inventory list -> output: format decisions). For each item pick a format that outlives any platform: HTML or PDF for stories (keeps formatting and author notes), a spreadsheet or bookmark file for bookmarks, plain text for reading lists.
- Run the download (input: format decisions -> output: local copies). Download each work with its full metadata - title, author, tags, a summary of kudos and comments. Save bookmarks as an HTML export if the platform offers one, or as a table you maintain by hand.
- Verify the copies (input: local copies -> output: a signed-off checklist). Open a random sample offline. Confirm chapters, formatting, and metadata all survived the export - a backup you cannot open is not a backup.
- Schedule the ritual (input: verified backup -> output: a recurring calendar block). Set a quarterly reminder to re-run the export. Keep the backup in a second location, such as an external drive or a separate cloud folder.
What good looks like
A dated folder that contains every story you published, every bookmark you saved, and a one-page README listing what was exported and when. You can open any story with no internet connection, and someone else in your household could find the folder and understand what it is.
Template preview
Fanworks Offline Backup Plan - Worksheet
Fill in each table and keep this sheet with your backup folder.
1. Inventory
2. Verification sample
3. Backup locations
- Primary copy: ________________________________________
- Second copy: ________________________________________
4. Next ritual date
- Next export run scheduled for: ____ / ____ / ____
