Save icon

Back in my day we extruded our own polyester film, coated it with our own rust and cut them into discs free hand! All that for 170K of storage!

Didn't floppy disks actually exist?
- Nah
- That's what Big Floppy want you to believe.

What even is a good alternative save icon these days?! This is the only save icon I know.

Edit: lmao I’ve gotten so many replies! I love y’all.

Lots of open source projects actually have some really good alternatives for it.
Set it in stone.
...maybe something more basic like this:
- "Why is the save button shaped like a complaint about poor quality copper?"
- Back then the version control really was v2 Final Final. The good ol days.
  We still do that level of version control. But we used to, too
- Ahh yes, something even more archaic is what's required! How about a clay tablet icon?
- Naaah dis be "compile", nerds be bitchin real soon
A floppy disk is fine, just like Photoshop uses terms like dodge and burn, references to obsolete dark room methods, like cutting and “pasting” were literally how some layout projects worked.
Referencing the last physical incarnation of saving a file seems fitting!
- Pretty harsh to the compact disc don't you think?
- I did photography at college a few years before digital technology took off. The old dodge and burn was way more fun. There was no undo button so you had to remember what gets done where and keep refining the print. It took ages. And the chemical smells were amazing!
- How the fuck is a floppy the last physical incarnation of saving a file? HDDs and SSDs are not made out ether.
  If you mean save media you commonly interact with, USB thumb drives still exist. Considering computers becoming much more commonplace in their era they probably have been actually used by more people than floppies.
Up arrow to a cloud, or down arrow to a platter (which, ironically, is also out-of-date)
- Up arrow to a cloud
  Vomits
- Up arrow to a cloud
  nice try Microsoft
- You just described upload and download, not save.
- Up arrow to Lakitu.
- Hard to disk drives are still around but you might want to make it look generically like a generic that could also be an SSD just as easy
It's just the download button, truly. They already associate that icon with saving files from the web. The down arrow pointing to a rectangle or laptop icon in word or similar app wouldn't be too ambiguous...
Or, truly, the floppy will just become a nebulous, originless heiroglyph meaning "keep this information for later and let me put it somewhere to find it again," and some Gen. Beta child will get curious and learn about ye olde days of magnetic media from Wikipedia.
Maybe a life preserver ring won’t become out of date? 🛟
- Yeah but that's awfully anglo-centric. Saving life has nothing to do with saving a file in other languages.
This:
Or a Christian cross (“Jesus saves”)
☁️ is a (rather terrible) way to indicate cloud saving.
I've seen an SD card used before.
sometimes there is a arrow going into a folder
but then again noone knows what the foldwe icon is supposed to depict nowadays either
It's time we upgrade the icon to Zip drives, or maybe Sony memory sticks.
- I miss those icons bro.
SD card?
- I could see this one working. It has the little signature cut off corner.
Yeah it's old and loses relevance, but we can go older and it circles back to recognizable again
✍️
Or just say the vending machine is because it's a store and you are storing the data when you save
Would need to have some sort of drive icon - maybe? - that is unlikely to ever be forgotten.. with a down arrow embedded inside.
Hmmm.
- That's a download button, an up arrow on the disk is an upload
  The save icon is too established to be changed. It can be simplified and become a glyph no one understands the meaning of, but it's cemented
Realistically the icon could br anything, even the green check emoji: ✅
But if we want to retain the thematic reference to a disk- icon-ify an m.2 2230 or similar and literally just swap em. lol
Image for reference:
- The average period-accurate computer user handled doppy flisks and so knows what they look like.
  The problem is that the average computer user of today probably doesn't even know what an M.2 drive is, much less what one looks like.
I once saw a usb thumb drive as an icon. Guess it didn't take off.
It might be the best actually since they're still around and, never say never, may not go anywhere. Though a USBA icon will confuse the USBC crowd soon enough.
A disc is also been used for some.
A princess in a tower guarded by a dragon, with a knight holding a sword getting ready to swing at the dragon.
A frog from Mother 3
/joke
I think one GTK/GNOME icon set had downward arrow pointing to a hard disk. Seemed clear enough to me.
A download icon?
And for larger files, maybe add more arrows and make a biblically accurate download icon? /j
- What would we use for download, then?
Man, if only it dispensed actual drinks. But yeah, it used to dispense your whole digital life on 1.44MB. Good times.
A piggy bank (it was supposedly considered at one point by a Microsoft team for an office product)
Maybe a hard drive or SSD. At least the hard drive cross-section is somewhat unique.
Loading circle then checkmark next to filename

Ironic, since Japan is one of the last holdouts requiring the use of floppy drive for use in government processes.

No, Japan has ended the usage of floppy disks last year, besides a single case relating to vehicle recycling.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/japan-declares-victory-effort-end-government-use-floppy-disks-2024-07-03/
- Skeptic, clicked, confirmed. Holly shit! Japan is using floppies in 21st century
- Curious about the vehicle recycling exemption
Me when I'm in a refusing modernization challenge and my opponent is Japan:
When you use old tech like that, sometimes it becomes a security feature.

Fuck Excel and Microsoft for tying auto save to OneDrive.

Jesus Christ, people really do love to make a problem out of anything, as long as it has "Microsoft" on the label, eh?
- Onedrive has been known to just randomly break programs like razer synapse and plenty of other things, and also reinstalling itself for no reason. A friend had a game running at 20fps and it was a known issue that onedrive caused it. I would prefer to have things autosave without using something that is acting indistinguishable from a virus.
- when you are a computer toucher, adding an extra three or four touches every time you want to save is frustrating.
- And people are correct to do so.
- I use it, I even pay for it. But Holy fuck it's bad! It makes explorer freeze when right clicking sometimes, moving files is slow, I can't create a new folder and name it at the same time because it interrupts the process, so I create new folder, it takes over, then I have to manually rename it from new folder.
  Its picture viewer in the Web app freezes half of the time, actually, on the android app too.
  If I didn't get such a good deal for it, I would go somewhere else. It's fucking trash.
So OneDrive actually saved me a ton of time this year at work. We implemented it at the end of last year, and we had a lot of problems with it at first.
So usually something would go wrong, and it was my job to dig deep and figure out what caused it. But for the first half of this year, I could just say, "I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it's OneDrive," and then I could relax and do something else.

Programs using this icon should restrict their file size to 1.44 MB. Everything else is just false advertising.

Maybe it's a super disk LS-240. They were up 240 MB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk
- I had one of those beast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive Probably still have it somewhere among the dust.
- Could be a zipdisk! Those where up to what 750megs?

Probably just ironic humour.

People in Japan still have access to search engines and have brains.

Theres something about this sentiment that slightly scares my very soul.
Remember the cinnamon challenge? It was just like a handful of weirdos doing it and in international news, they said it was average Americans because of our underfunded education system.

I'm 20 btw.

Lol
These are just what I had handy LMAO I'm also 30+ and still remember dialup so maybe it's not that impactful either way 😂
- Why do individually-sealed diskettes like Kraft Singles feel so wrong?
- skshhhhhhhSKHHHHHHHH gnah gnah eeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEE
They are fun to use, they sound neat, and they dont give me data overload of a 1 tb hard drive filling up and wondering where all the space went. Sure, all you can use it for is a few text docs or 10 low res pictures, but its at least physical and a lot harder to wreck than a cd.
Come back when you have some punch cards. ;)
Me likey. The floppy drive clicks symphony tho 😬

The other day I got a press release about disaster preparedness for grade school kids.

It made mention of teaching kids how to use a battery powered radio to get information. And it suddenly struck me that my 8 year old nephew likely has never even SEEN an FM radio, much less would know how to tune one to a specific station.

Shit like that makes me feel reaaaaaaallllly old…

My elderly father was confused when he bought an old style fm radio and found out it was only a Bluetooth speaker.
I'm in my 30s and really never actually used an old radio like that. Like there were some laying around that nobody used anymore and I kind of played with them as a kid, but I'm right on the cusp of not knowing how to use one.
- I still know the kind you tune with a slider on a coil. Same age.
- 25 soon to be 26, my family liked to camp out in the Mojave when I was a kid so I do know how to use them but even for me I am far more familiar with stereos .
Tell em it's analog wi-fi
- WiFi is of course radio. We just tune in and listen to it differently.
  If you limited your bandwidth to 20 or 30 kHz, you could build a “radio” that you manually tune to a WiFi channel frequency and that produces audible noise. You could then build a 1980’s style modem to convert the audio back into a bitstream that you could run your network connection over.
  It would be about many times slower than standard Wifi though modern compression could speed that up a bit.
You probably still have an FM radio in your car. You just use it so infrequently that your forget it is there.
- Sure, in a technical sense, that’s true - the car radio in our 2025 Hyundai i10 is a DAB+ radio, which supposedly still has backup FM capability. Which is never used, as you just pick the station from a list. It’s never used anyway - I much prefer podcasts.

The only writing icon that matters is the drumming gif. It doesn’t even make sense anymore but it was so unbelievably perfect for the time.

What is that supposed to represent???
- Wait for it.... 😏
- “Drumroll please…”
Did it ever make sense?
- Yes, early 90s hard drives really sounded like a drumroll.

Hang on didn’t the Japanese government only like last year decide to stop using floppies?

Yeah but kids don't have to file with the gov, their parents do.
Yeah, it seems like Japan of all places should be where people should still have the most familiarity with them

Why not this?

There was an 8" one before that too.
I dunno man. A brick falling on some guy's head and making his eyes pop out seems like an excessively violent symbol.
Get with the 3.5" floppy times man!
I've seen that on some vintage software.
Graphical operating systems weren't a thing when the actually floppy discs were dominant. When icons started to be developed, the hard encased discs were the thing people were using.
- My Geos i ran on my C64 begs to differ

If you want to make a greybeard feel old, grab one of the old floppies that they still have in a filing cabinet, hold it up and say, "Hey look, someone 3D printed a save icon!"

Hey I have plenty of floppies still around, and my beard is not grey.
I shave.

You think it's bad that the save icons have floppy disks?

A while ago, I was wondering why the usual icon for "database" (upright cylinder divided into multiple horizontal slices) looks like the original flowchart symbol for drum memory, further refined to look like a 1960s hard drive, you know, one of those washing machine sized units. But then again, if you have a serious database, chances are it's running on some several layers deep virtualised replica of a 1960s system

I thought that represented money

Every time you save a file in Microsoft, your credit card is charged $.50

Nice try Satan, but my start up is building ads into car start ups. You can't switch gears until the ad is done.
- My startup is building ads into ad startups. You can't ad before you finish an ad.

Satire no?

Has to be. The Japanese still use fax machines
Yeah. This shit comes around once or twice a year. It’s something to make the younger generations feel special and distanced from their predecessors.
Yeah. This shit comes around once or twice a year. It’s something to make the younger generations feel special and distanced from their predecessors.
No. Millenials barely remember floppies. From that point down younger generations have no fucking idea what they are
- What are you on about Millenials barely remembering floppies? We grew up using them until at least highschool, even if other writable media existed before then.

It is only mid 2020s and people already asking such questions. Imagine late 2030s or even 2040s.

Imagine we were dead
- Society really wants humans gone, and replaced with AI girlfriends, and numans.
What the fuck is VR? Is that like brain diving?

I once had what I thought was a friend, but who was definitely a teacher. He joked that he brought a floppy disk to his school and his students asked who had 3d printed a save icon.

"Look, dad, someone 3D printed a save icon!"

If young people anywhere would see floppies, I'm guessing Japan would be more likely than a lot of other places. They're notoriously slow about getting rid of old tech. I think Sony was still making VCRs until 2016, and faxes were ubiquitous even like 10 years ago.

I saw people in the mid 2000s plug in USB floppy drives so they could work with whatever records they still had on floppy. I have no idea why that was easier for them than just putting the files on a USB drive.

Two that come to mind: Deutsche Bahn still transfers the seat reservation database to the trains using diskettes. And San Francisco Muni uses 5.25 Floppies for their light rail trains.

Maybe it's time to change the save icon into a USB drive.

These days I'm starting to see more and more of an arrow pointing down towards a hard drive, a file folder, or an outbox bin. I feel like that's a suitable replacement.
- to me that means "download" rather than "save." if I'm using an online editor, "save" might not download anything.
- Yeeees. This.
Is it really so bad if it’s just a legacy icon?
- If your discord server is inundated with people who have no idea which one of these damn buttons save, yeah. I saw the same thing happen on a PHPBB in 2010. To many, that icon means nothing.
Not unless you’re ready to change “hung up” to “tapped end.”

In the UK the image on signs for speed cameras is a old 19th century bellows style camera

Because it is hard to put there Jesus. He, same as floppy, died to became a save icon. /s

When skeuomorphic isn’t anymore.

TIL about skeuomorphisms

I live in Japan and haven't heard of this, but I'm generally allergic to most social media. I'll have to ask my wife when I get home if she's seen it.

It works, when vending (saving) you make: the machine (the app) vend (save/create) a drink (a file).

No, I think it's kind of opposite. If the machine is vending you a drink, that would be better as the "open" icon. You choose which drink (file) you want, and the vending machine gives you the one you asked for.

Not a vending machine. It's clearly the third member of Daft Punk with a snaggletooth.

Maybe it needs to be a 5.25" floppy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)

Why not clay tablets?

Jesus that makes me feel old and I never once in my life used a floppy drive.

Oh man I distinctly remember being taught how to insert the floppy disk and then select the A: drive to save to the floppy disk on windows 3.1 in my elementary school computer class. My dad's Prince of Persia game was on like ten floppy disks.
- I'm kinda a little jealous of all the people who had computer classes growing up. The schools just expected us to know how to use them and how they work by the time I was getting in

[I/O] instead?