How to persist big RecyclerView data on orientation changes?

Question

I'm making an app with content structure somewhat similar to Reddit. In my MainActivity.java I have a RecyclerView that could possibly have really much content. The content is loaded from the web, and I don't want to load it again everytime when the screen rotates.

So, I have a RecyclerView setup something like this:

MainActivity.java

List<CustomItem> data;


    // Volley and GSON magic to load content from the web into data list
GsonRequest gsonRequest = new GsonRequest<CustomResponse>("http://example.json",
    CustomResponse.class, null, new Response.Listener<CustomResponse>(){
    @Override
    public void onResponse(CustomResponse response) {
        for(CustomItem item : response.getItems()){
            data.add(item);
        }

        mAdapter = new CustomAdapter(data);
        mRecycler.setAdapter(mAdapter);
    },
    new Response.ErrorListener(){
        @Override
        public void onErrorResponse(VolleyError error) {
            Log.d("E", error.getMessage());
        }
});


VolleySingleton.getInstance().getRequestQueue().add(gsonRequest);

CustomResponse.class

public class CustomResponse {
    @SerializedName("items")
    private List<CustomItem> items;

    public List<CustomItem> getItems(){
         return items;
    }

CustomItem.java is something like this, although I have a lot more variables in it

public class CustomItem {
    @SerializedName("id")  // that awesome GSON magic
    public long mID;

    @SerializedName("title");
    public String mTitle;

    @SerializeName("another_item")
    public AnotherItem mAnotherItem; // A custom object that I need
}

Obviously the data is loaded every time the screen orientation changes.

My question is: How do I persist the data on my RecyclerView when the configuration changes? What's the best way?

I'm thinking of only two options:

1. making List<CustomItem> data Parcelable, and saving it in onSaveInstanceState() and restore the data when needed
2. Using Sqlite to write the contents to a database, and populate my RecyclerView from there. Remove content from there when not needed.