- All of Wikipedia English
- Download as many LLM models and the latest version of Ollama.app and all its dependencies.
- Make a list of my favorite music artists and torrent every album I can.
- Open my podcast app and download every starred episode (I have a ton of those that I listen to repeatedly).
- Torrent and libgen every tech book I value. Then, grab large collections of fiction EPUBs.
- Download every US Army field manual I can get my hands on, especially the Special Operations Medic manual, which is gold for civilian use in tough times.
- Download every radio frequency list I can for my area of the country.
- Download digital copies of The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emory, Where There Is No Doctor, and Where There Us No Dentist.
I already have paper versions of almost all of these but it’s handy to have easily-reproducible and far more portable digital copies.
To preserve a copy of the humanity's recorded knowledge, you'd have to keep a copy of the library of Congress + archives of all scientific journals + arxiv.org, and equivalents of it for other languages, like Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Hindi,.. Then there is a ton of proprietary and sometimes secret information held by companies and crucial for their functioning.
Like, "explains it as well as a person who doesn't know anything about it but is reading the wikipedia page".
Like, "explains it but lies, and when you catch them at it, insists that they weren't lying".
Like, "can't actually do math, but has had heard lots of math problems so they guess and hope you don't check on them".
A sleazy marketer's idea of "explains it to you".
A lot of historical information on the Internet only scrape the top 50% of the knowledge on niche subjects, if even that. So often I see forum requests along the lines of "can someone scan page 242 of book X please".
https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revo...
For example, the saying where I live is an acre and a half for a cow and a calf. Where my folks live you need closer to 10 acres for the two animals.
The USDA has hyper local guides for native and garden plants and native and farmed animals. Mostly in PDF so they can be easily printed.
I mostly value the Encyclopedia of Country Living for it's old world skills (canning, food preservation, etc), but I'm fortunate also to live in a rural area with a lot of farmers and I have ready access to relatives and friends who are well-versed in those old world skills and they've been happy to teach them to me.
- PDFs of the Black and Deck Guides to Home (repair/plumbing/carpentry/etc). Available for purchase/torrenting. Available on torrent sites. Not always up to code or best practice, but good enough to get you going and explain how the parts of your house's systems work.
I'm not really sure of exact sizes, but books and PDFs don't take up much space at all. I'd guess a few hundred megabytes? Wikipedia is ~20gb, IIRC.
Physically, I have paper copies of books stashed all over the place. It consumes a decent amount of space all together (~ 4 feet by 9 feet ~18 inches in volume)
It’s almost like going for a programming book from 1982 vs now. The state of the medical art has changed substantially for the better since 1982.
The newer post-2004-ish guides include substantial updates to field medical care techniques (especially WRT blood loss, eg gunshot wounds).
There are PDFs of the newer SOC guide on the net. I’ll try to find some good links when I get back near a computer.
idk if it applies to you, but single week of training will be worth 10 000 pages of pdf, when shtf you won't have time to read much
I recently purchased a Mac Studio with 128gb RAM for the sole purpose of being able to run 70b models at 8-bit quantization
What I'd really be concerned about would be our modern society. Purchasing food, water, fuel, clothes and other necessities would be near impossible. Supply chains would not just have problems, but literally fall apart. Money would stop moving.
If anything is "too big to fail" it would be the internet.
Along with no banking there's no way to order supplies. No way to accept delivery. The very least of your problems is music or Wikipedia.
And I know you're thinking cash will help you, but its not enough. We used to have forests of paper and squadrons of clerks- that simply doesn't exist anymore.
While we don't have forests of paper, we have pocket-sized computers that can talk peer to peer and store practically infinite amounts of transactions.
We don't have squadrons of clerks but we have software that can collate transactions locally.
The internet is certainly a useful tool for quick connectivity but there are definitely ways to do things without the internet and without reverting all the way back to cash/check and paper ledgers.
It's the equivalent of "if your house was burning down what would you grab?"
My most likely "internet down" scenario would be my local government deciding to launch a national firewall, probably under the guise of "combatting disinformation, malinformation, misinformation, and foreign interference".
For that scenario I need as many VPNs as possible, a VPS in a friendly jurisdiction, and a TOR browser.
If the "internet is down" for "good", it's hard to me to think of a scenario where it didn't bring down the rest of civilization down along with it.
Having recently had a week long internet outage I can say quite confidently, nothing really.
The things that caused me massive anxiety during that outage was things that are real time.
No communication, since all my communication is through VOIP services of some sort, even mobile calls might be down depending on how you define internet.
And no banking at all, my bank doesn't even have physical branches and most banks in my country have gone that way, even going to a physical branch for one of the larger incumbent banks they just put you on a call with their call center, they cannot help you locally. The tellers and just fancy ATMs and they charge you a premium to use them instead of the ATM outside. If you thing that wont be an issue, well the internet is down, that local branch is useless.
There's still many cash based business so that's less of an issue for me but we will definitely have pandemic level panic again. I mean during the pandemic people bought all the toilet paper here, not the food but the toilet paper...
Online media will be the least of your problems and large swaths of that information is available and backed up at libraries around the world. Likewise if only the network is down the servers still exist so the data didn't go away.
Also if Y2K taught us anything is that we will solve the problem relatively quickly and even if what we currently know as the internet fails a different form of the internet will be back up soon enough.
Tangential thought but we should probably work hard to preserve libraries in the future. Real ones, with books. They are really unmatched when it comes to longevity and safeguarding information in a way that computers cannot replicate.
If I knew the internet was going out tomorrow I wouldn't spend any time on the internet at all. I would go the grocery store, gas station, friends houses and then get as far from major cities as I could.
How so? There are long-term digital storage technologies that would long outlast any book and are many orders of magnitude denser.
If the internet were to just suddenly "go down" globally it would of course be a disaster and result in much unrest, panic, supply chain breakdowns, and general collapse of society. It it so interwoven into everything we depend on.
society would end. some bumpy roads, sure, but we did very well before the internet and we’d do fine without it. we would just rebuild.
it’s just not as instrumental as some people make it out to be. nice? absofuckinlutely. necessary? nopes.
I downloaded as much documentation about the technology I relied on as possible. Ma pages, cloning repos, saving websites as HTML, etc. My goal was to have everything I needed in case I had to build my own internet again. Even if it was like cubas version that uses thumb drive based networking.
It worked for the most part. The one downside was having to ration my electricity usage as it was generated by a generator and fuel was not easy to come by.
This taught me that any kind of network requires a robust electrical grid. So, I’d install solar panels with batteries, a backup generator, some wind turbines, and then work on downloading all the documentation needed to make the network work.
I hardly travel anymore but still wind up using all of those local resources. It's zero web searches, next to no latency, and I have the structure memorized. Finding information I need is so fast.
I wish it was more popular to have a local-first mindset when writing software.
That said, it's not out of box like a Macbook.
* Offline copies of Wikipedia, Stack Overflow and some others using Kiwix
* Arch Linux iso and mirror of some packages for installing a new system
* Godot Engine along with game assets shamefully stolen from hl2, so I can have some creative outlet, or make training sims if things got so bad
* Hours of videos and songs I like
Today I would probably include Llama or other LLMs.
It's unfortunate to see big companies pushing for an online-only world. Windows 11 requiring Internet access to install, YouTube restricting yt-dlp and YouTube Premium downloaded videos only being playable if the app was able to ping YouTube servers in the past few days. It really feels like technology is regressing, we are creating new problems for ourselves for no good reason. But I guess it's fine when all of the company offices are in rich Western countries with fast and stable internet access.
we could probably rebuild civilization just from 3blue1brown.
It's definitely one of the best learning resources on the topics it covers, but I'd say the actual textbooks are a more valuable resource. After all his most timeless videos cover traditional calculus and linear algebra. Stuff you'd find explained in a more rigorous and confusing fashion in every tech undergrad curriculum.
Also I'd be more concerned with mechanical engineering over CNNs in times of rebuilding civilization.
They are interesting, valuable records of humanity in the early 21st century, but they - and other social media - contain a higher volume of misinformation and disinformation than anything the world has seen, and I'd say a higher proportion than anything since (the Middle Ages? Hard to compare.). Think of the infinite conspiracy theories and just plain bad information on Reddit, for example.
while you are probably sincere, when I hear terms like misinformation and disinformation these days I think, "tell me you have a received ontology without telling me you have a received ontology." that's how divided the discourse is. I'd save them because those sites were what people said when they felt they could express themselves honestly, and all gems are covered in muck, it just takes some digging and refinement.
So a few years ago I started up a server that slowly (so as not to annoy any YouTube rate limits) downloaded copies of every video from channels I enjoy. I also threw in a few "normal" YouTube channels that I just happen to like.
Today it's archived over 7500 videos and it's still rolling along.
BBC Archive: https://www.youtube.com/@BBCArchive
AT&T Archives: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDB8B8220DEE96FD9
BBC Computer Literacy Project (UK only?): https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk
The Computer Chronicles: https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles
Blue OS Museum: https://www.youtube.com/@BlueOSMuseum
The perspective on this changes if you stop being a consumer, and start being an author.
Are those "Lingerie and Adult Toys" stores on the outskirts of town filled with DVD's and magazines?
Telegram, Discord and assorted communities do a lot for keeping some semblance of "stashing" alive
Also there's Whisparr
The "weird" part of it (And why I believe a lot of people don't think about it at first) is the amount of forethought that this involves "The algorithm" plays a significantly larger part on sites where it's considered a faux pas to have an account, and actively curating a collection is considered creepy, unlike with music
Of course the relevant stores will not be very common.
It sparks some amazement in me still to wrap my head around the reality of so much information in a thing the size of my pinky. Or the size of my pinky nail if you use a micro SD card. And yeah, just took a weekend of downloading and setting it up, and flashdrives/microsd cards are easily found at department stores, or even gas stations sometimes.
Even disregarded any potential doomsday utility, the amusement/amazement it's brought me was well worth the modest time/money it took. I hope more people give it a try
If all computers go down and all cables burn to ashes simultaneously then it's maybe a good idea to preserve RISC-V For Dummies and Cable-making For Dummies as well.
Also, OpenLibrary, AniDB / Anilist / Anime-Planet / GoodReads / IMDB / jeuxvideo.com / Last.fm / LibraryThing / MangaUpdates / MyAnimeList / MyDramaList / NovelUpdates / Shikimori / TheTVDB / WLNUpdates (databases of various entertainment stuff).
Then I can look in the GPS where to find them.
I wish there was a simple, portable, plug-and-play solution for downloading and viewing maps on Linux/Desktop computers.
For the internet to "go down for an indefinite period" there would need to be some pretty big changes to our current world. The reason it "goes down" also matters a lot.
1) Political reasons (eg: whomever is in power wants to control information flow)
This will likely mean that certain kinds of information can still flow because we don't want to crash the entire economy.
In this case, I would want all of the information I could get my hands on about known history. This includes previous regimes and how they ultimately played out.
2) Geo-political (some other country bans your access to their resources)
This is a harder case to enforce without complete isolation ... but theoretically possible.
In this case, technical howtos are still useful as you can probably still get modern supplies. Depending on what my country produces, I would probably want to get all information about those processes as I could. Also, if my country doesn't produce a lot of food, information on what can be grown locally would be helpful... along with ways to protect it from nature.
3) Global catastrophe (plague/virus/nuclear winter/etc...)
Maybe enough of the internet is just "lost" and the technical means to resurrect it has also disappeared.
At this point, you need to think about being completely self-sufficient. ie: Grow your own food, make your own tools, protect yourself from animals and people. It would be helpful to have some tools at the start for this. Maybe even just basic gardening tools and a greenhouse ... and whatever form of protection makes the most sense to you. Find some land that can sustain you; Leftover city supplies will likely disappear very fast.
4) All of the above, simultaneously.
It's time to just get a Bible and start praying. Maybe a bunker, too. Survival will likely be a lot of luck and a lot of cunning.
Any examples? Do all computers have capacitors that will die within a certain number of years?
Running CPUs and boards at lower power settings can also help. Thermal cycling is the enemy of longevity. Being able to control CPU frequency will be helpful.
Many power supplies have electrolytic caps in them as well. If you can stick to a standard that’s easy to find then there is a good chance you can just salvage an existing power supply that has managed to survive.
Some cheaper examples to consider would be raspberrypi boards with usb-c power. Don’t run them at full speed to reduce long-term thermal effects. About a decade ago I would have suggested Intel Atom based systems for similar reasons.
Server hardware is often made to a better spec for longevity. I miss old sparc hardware; I feel like those machines could last forever.
Today, arm based systems are probably a good bet since you can find lots of software for them and they run cooler than (say) x86 variants of similar caliber.
Storage is the next Achilles heel to consider. Cheap flash will die sooner rather than later. I’m not up on the best tech in this space anymore though so somebody else might chime in here.
Finally, displays can be pretty fragile. Phone displays actually come to mind as a decently ruggedized technology. Bigger displays are probably more prone to damage long-term so, small and durable is probably valuable here.
I’ll probably catch flak for this but… a smartphone is actually a pretty decent computer that can last a very long time. If you can run arbitrary software on it and keep it in one place instead of in your pocket, it could be a good get. The issue I know of here is the battery; if it gets too weak then some phones may not be able to power up completely even with a power supply attached.
I don't read How to write horrible code and what to do when that's your codebase. I do have to know the latter a bit, but no more than necessary.
But, people have been trying to predict the end of the world since antiquity so there's that
For historians - Wikipedia and YouTube.
For my use? Google Maps (or actually Mapy.cz, local Czech map provider data). I think it might get useful when hunting for zombies.
who knows how long the net goes down for, and if i try to just save what exists, it would run out after _some_ time (maybe not my time, but when unknown time horizons are probable, a generator > a pile, imo)
All that to mainly say..I appreciate you. It's one of my favorite projects, and I hope it keeps going strong indefinitely.
Open Street Maps - definitely detailed North America + planet for good measure
deepseek-coder-v2 236b - Great coding assistant
llama 3.1 70b - Much more practical to run
My Google Photos since I have lots of good memorries on there.
My Steam collection won't work because it needs the Internet and DRM to work.
And how much would a solution be worth to you?
That's why I have a consumer NAS at home where I backup all my most precious media. Simply because I've worked in IT for 20 years so I believe more in off-site backups than I do in the reliability of IT services.
I really like the setup since it doesn't require a bunch of time investment, there's no custom scripts to set up or community packages to install.
"All the objects we found in the domestic site 1357.# contain the same marking, "MAD EIN CHIN A". We have been unable to decode this but its presence on everything we found suggests that it was a prayer or mantra to a domestic god"
I would double-check my offline backups of everything I care about (personal files and professional projects, as well as local copies of music and videos), be sure my local maps are up to date for directions, and perhaps grab new videos from a YouTube channels to have some new entertainment in case I wasn't able to get anything new for a while.
Otherwise, there's not much I'd want. Presumably my local library would still have books, and the radio would still carry news. Most of what I find valuable on the internet are things that refresh in near real-time like message boards and news, or aren't really data to be backed up so much as services I use like ordering food or checking my bank balance.
Having recently gone through over three weeks of power, internet, and cell service outage with Hurricane Helene, at no point was I tempted to go into town and download me some more internet for use offline.
Even if the studio can get the signal out to a transmitter, how will news get to the studio? How will you be able to trust it? You might have someone saying something in a CB radio if you have one, but can you rely on that random person?
Even simple things like this would be difficult. For starters, ticketing tends to be powered by 5G on buses and over physical networks for permanent fare gates like at a railway station.
Bus arrivals screens and boards at stations are also fed by the network.
I guess if we take a generous interpretation of the OP's question though, those would still be able to function assuming they work over a private network instead of the internet.
Music that I do not already have on CD. Videos that contain useful knowledge on DIY medical procedures, DIY home repair and assorted other DIY knowledge. I archive this stuff already. That's about it really. I try to avoid any dependency on the internet or smart phones given the commercial internet did not exist for a big part of my life.
If you would like to begin preparing for your tomorrows, this is a good place to start: https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/
- bootable linux usb drives which can be inserted into any PC.
- archives of programming languages - the source code for the language as well as all the libraries. Eg. mvn, npm, cargo, pip, etc.
- archive of 'important' projects on Github
Ideally, you should be able to boot from USB and compile any application without internet.
- Maps (including trails)
- Growing food - agriculture, raising animals, etc
- Medicine, chemistry, biology, pharmacology books/videos/etc
- Educational programs (like Khan Academy)
- AI models and all the dependencies required to run them offline (eg. GPU drivers, etc).
This archive would be quite clumsy if it came as just a bunch of zip files, so a search index for all this content would be of great help.
I've been long thinking about working on this Archive.. I believe there would be enough people willing to purchase it just for archival purposes.
It would come in handy if we were to travel to other planets too !
Hit me up if you think this is worth working on, I'd happily join/lead such an effort.
Wikipedia in my language.
Music and movies that are important to me that I only access via streaming. Maybe a few TV shows in SD.
A giant bundle of ebooks is I can find one (e.g., in a public torrent).
Open-source ecology.
-----
The things I'd really want archived but that there probably wouldn't be time to archive in such a short period without already having mostly-complete offline copies:
- Wikipedia (in all languages)
- Internet Archive
- GNU projects and docs
- Apache projects and docs
- Nix, Nixpkgs and docs
- as many books as possible regardless of source (e.g., LibGen)
- as much music as possible regardless of source
- everything public on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, SourceHut, Codeberg
- all KDE source code and docs
- maybe video content (in SD only) based on some coarse filter like whether a movie is in the Library of Congress
- maybe archives of some popular forums and forum platforms like Reddit, StackOverflow, important Discourse instances
- various protocols and standards docs?It would be just the global internet? What would want to have in our local (continent, country, city, home, etc) internet provided that I have enough resources? The balkanization of Internet is still in the menu.
Or it may be some global event disabling all computers, like a cosmic EMP?
There are several “easy” things to download and have usable somehow. Wikipedia used to have available as download copy of the database. Google still have takeout for all my things that it have stored. A lot of the public code in GitHub or other public repositories are easy to download.
The things I store are those that seem valuable and information-dense, the kinds that I would be able to use in a relatively prolonged isolation. Storage space is limited, and redundancy is important for backups, so more copies of important information are preferable, to some extent, over added less important information. That is, one may consider tiered backups.
Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, perhaps as OpenZIM archives (for Kiwix, making them more readily accessible), look like good starting points, along with other Wikimedia projects (e.g., Wikisource, Wiktionary; also available as OpenZIM archives). A music collection is a part of my personal backups. Then there are textbooks: OpenStax provides good ones under the CC BY license, LibreTexts books are of variable quality, but also worthwhile to look into, while WikiBooks are mostly disappointing. Then one may consider copyright-infringing book libraries, if one is fine with those. A few hundred gibibytes seem sufficient for a decent stockpile, including a good chunk of human knowledge, and providing plenty to do alone (read and study, that is).
Textbooks could be much more lightweight if their sources (e.g., in LaTeX) were provided, rather than PDFs, but unfortunately even for those under permissive licenses, usually only PDFs are available, which hinders both printing (as another form of backups) and regular digital data storage.
I expect the government will block software repositories among the last ones, so not backing up those yet, but mirroring, say, Debian archive (including sources) may be a good idea for such a situation, or when preparing for the Internet to go down.
If one has a lot of extra storage available, other easily available large data dumps to consider are Common Crawl, arXiv bulk data downloads, complete OSM data, huge copyright-infringing libraries, and videos: plenty of nice YouTube channels and TV series.
I also like the opposite thought experiment, turns out I have so much of the Internet that I'd love to never come back online. The whole shitcoin scene, poof, gone.
Knowledge/Entertainment: A huge subset of LibGen/Anna's Archive. Wikipedia. Survival guides. Tons of websites, especially smaller ones that might not get preserved. I think the NYTimes will be fine, but random indie websites, not so much. Lots of music. Project Gutenberg and swaths of the Online Books Page listed items. Videos, and of course VLC (if it's not already downloaded). Various coding things (I, I assume unusually for HN, am not a programmer and don't know any programming languages, might as well learn to code.) Minecraft or a knockoff, on the off chance I somehow get bored.
Creating: LibreOffice (if it's not already installed). If it works offline, the Inspiral app, because spirographs make everything better. Gimp, Inkscape, Krita.
Personal: Records of as much of my digital life as I can get. So comments, posts, etc. I want to be able to look back at who I was.
Organization: Calibre (again, assuming it's not installed). Obsidian.
And since I use git, even my version control stays nice and local.
Main things I would need to make an offline version of, offhand, are my GitHub Issues list, as that’s online only right now and where I track what I’m doing on my games, some documentation for Love2d and Monogame would be nice, and our recipes.
We have a few printouts for some recipes, but most are linked in a Google Sheets excel file.
Most written content I am interested in I already have backed up (for example PDFs of various Wikipedia articles).
Maybe also the latest DVD release of Tumbleweed in case I have use for it.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwi...
Ah, and currently I would also preserve some current LLama to tinker with.
Educational resources for training people in skills they’ll need. Everything from K-12 to eHow.
Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica to preserve our knowledge. Specialist ones like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Mayo Clinic, too.
Source code for major OSS like Linux, OpenOffice, etc. Hardware designs, too. Especially old-school stuff on primitive fabs or hand-wired. We’ll be covered both ways.
I think we can remake everything else from scratch using the prior lessons learned.
I'd probably write some tools to organize it all, and end up re-creating most of the good content of the sites I like to visit.
After this, I'd get to the 8 Terabyte NAS I've had tucked away, with all the crap I've ever downloaded since 1993. :P
Imperfect as they are they’re an incredibly dense summary of the internet.
And then duplicate all the repos plus maybe a couple of those old school multi dvd Ubuntu editions intended for offline. Just in case I missed something like a dev essentials package. Copies of the top handful of python packages would also be grand
Chances of missing something crucial is sky high though so this would need a dry run
It would also be nice to download the "card catalog" of the local library for offline use at home, if that was possible.
Truth is, "tomorrow" is not enough advance notice for me to save much. Need to be proactive, i.e., "What have I already preserved if the internet went down tomorrow".
We were discussing in my office today how there might be widespread protests about the election result soon.
Who knows how crazy people get, a few dedicated pissed people in a few key places could be quite disastrous.
Also, a bunch of dev related git repos, such as zig, rust, microsft/stl, python
Mind, it probably wouldn't work for me, I have fiber to my house, no POTS. I dunno if the old 56K modems work or not.
It's less than 100 TiB, and I think that if the Internet went away right now, I'd be okay information/entertainment wise for the rest of my life.
Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley so I can rick roll people on the post-internet era.
Newgrounds.
It'd eventually sort itself out to the ways pre-internet, sure - but so much now is built on internet-connected tech, not pre-internet tech.
All OSM data and openaddresses data.
Nothing. I'd be too busy celebrating.
(Even though I'd likely be out of work.)
Downloading music, some great movies, books. For other content I have DevonThink database
Basically (almost) the whole internet backup.
- You can do anything at zombo com
They are important, and slowly being lost to time and produced less and less …
Nothing, let it go down ;-)
- Wikipedia articles
- YouTube videos
- Google images
Yes we'd lose probably a good chunk of cultural artifacts but 99% of those are transient and will eventually be lost to the sands of time anyway (this is true for nearly every era).
Meanwhile the 'culture' downstream of the internet is vapid, self-centered, packed with rage and perversion, does little to stop human suffering or strife, and is essentially a wealth consolidation and mass surveillance tool for the gentry.
That said, I have done this prior to a combat deployment in a faraway land, I loaded a ton of books, wikipedia, and movies/TV shows up on an external harddrive.
I used it maybe twice and for non-critical stuff. It was eye-opening (and refreshing) how little me, my buddies, or the people we were working with cared about this nonsense, especially upon the realization that it had almost no bearing or impact on who we were or what we were doing.
Nothing at all.
Surveillance. That's the main purpose, isn't it ? /s
I say this because the Internet is so integral to our current society and way of life that it would be like losing access to electricity. Most young people have never lived in a world without Internet access. Electronic payments, logistics, food distribution, etc would all stop functioning. Society is far more fragile than anyone wants to admit and people would panic.