Learn English – Why we say “save file” and not “keep/preserve file”

As always with etymologies of computer related terms I have turned to the jargon file.

Now, though it does not have a mention of the term specifically, it does describe following (you can read only the highlighted part):

:Conway's Law: prov.

The rule that the organization of the software and the organization of the software team will be congruent; commonly stated as "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler". The original statement was more general, "Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." This first appeared in the April 1968 issue of {Datamation}. Compare {SNAFU principle}.

The law was named after Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker who wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. (The name `SAVE' didn't stand for anything; it was just that you lost fewer card decks and listings because they all had SAVE written on them.) There is also Tom Cheatham's amendment of Conway's Law: "If a group of N persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be N-1 passes. Someone in the group has to be the manager."

So, possibly the term save was chosen because it was possibly already used for the punch cards to separate the ones that need to be stored, kept, preserved...