Microsoft's help pages are the worst for this. "Oooh, confusing .NET problem I'll google a response - Hey, a nice forum-post explaining that MS has a document telling me how to handle this issue click NOOOOOOOOOOOOO".

Whenever I have a C# problem and google it, I always skip the MSFT documentation and go straight to any possible Stackoverflow or discussion page.

Same here, it's not even worth going on their site.

There used to be a whole slew of helpful msdn (technet?) blog posts which now not only redirect but also require logging in with an MS account to read them.

It's really unhelpful.

edit: Actually I just checked and it looks like they've eased up on the need for logging in, I guess they saw too much of a backlash. (Or just flip flopped their own decision again.)

I pay pinboard.in to host cached copies of everything I bookmark.

For keeping local copies, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozilla-archi... is a good add-on that improves Firefox's save functionality. I use it very frequently: ctrl-s, Enter, and I get an .mht of the page I'm reading.

For remote copies, https://archive.org/ can be instructed to keep a copy of a page, e.g.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://news.ycombinator.com/ to check for copies

https://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/ to record a copy

These bookmarklets can be used to go from your current page to /web/ or /save/:

  javascript:(function(){window.open('https://web.archive.org/web/*/'+(''+window.location));})();

  javascript:(function(){window.open('https://web.archive.org/save/'+(''+window.location));})();

Unfortunately, this won't work on sites that robots.txt-block Internet Archive, and existing archives may be made inaccessible by a future robots.txt block.

http://archive.is/ is another useful site that executes all of the JavaScript and captures the post-JS-execution DOM.

Thank you for your information. I'm looking for tools to save my useful information like other people do. I have two problems with this type of archival tool besides the robots.txt issue:

1. The static snapshot can only give us an idea of what it looked like because it's not functioning, not updating. Better than nothing, but we may have no clue what we want to find other than a few keywords. If you need to search the entire context of the archival, everybody needs to install a mini search engine.

2. If it becomes popular like Google, so many people are going to use it, it will create so much data duplication on everybody's pc, which is helpful but not an efficient solution.

Do you like to have a self-organized personal private web on top of the public web via a few clicks? http://bit.ly/1c2DzN6

That's what the Internet Archive is for :)

And there's an interesting idea for a browser extension.

If the page the user is looking for no longer exists, check the internet archive and present that instead.

I use this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pag... It's not automatic, but I guess it wouldn't be hard.

I started saving/clipping entire articles for this purpose. Evernote has a 'clipper' functionality which works fairly well, or you can print to PDF.

I tried Evernote. I can archive information pages into notebooks as groups and find by tags. But it cannot save dynamic product/service information with updates, and it's not self-organized. So like other online bookmarks, it's not popularly used.

This is exactly right and the sole reason I use Evernote for its full page clipping abilities.