this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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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.
/joke
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
Sorry for the convenience
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
sometimes there is a arrow going into a folder
but then again noone knows what the foldwe icon is supposed to depict nowadays either
That's the icon for the Downloads Folder
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!
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!
Pretty harsh to the compact disc don't you think?
You don't save to a CD, you burn it
CD wasn't even the last physical media that was adopted widely. Technically I think that may be thumbdrives for now, but there were some tape and disc shaped, but high density for the time (like 20MB to 100MB for the disk shaped one, and 1GB to 2GB tapes.) and named something I don't remember, media options that were created in the late '90s early '00s before thumbdrives became a thing.
What about MicroSD? Still being put on game consoles and smartphones to this day.
Up arrow to a cloud, or down arrow to a platter (which, ironically, is also out-of-date)
Vomits
It can be your own selfhosted cloud
nice try Microsoft
Could be legitimate when it's a Web app where saving is "push my version to the server".
You just described upload and download, not save.
Up arrow to Lakitu.
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? 🛟
That's 'Help', not 'Save'
This is Help
cool, now we got a reference older than the 3.5 inch floppy
Yeah but that's awfully anglo-centric. Saving life has nothing to do with saving a file in other languages.
An icon of a saint works for Slavic languages.
A download icon?
And for larger files, maybe add more arrows and make a biblically accurate download icon? /j
I think one GTK/GNOME icon set had downward arrow pointing to a hard disk. Seemed clear enough to me.