Compiling a Personal Offline Information Library for when there's no more internet - any suggestion

Hi All

I have loads of links in my favorites to all kinds of survival and DIY tech ideas/projects.

In the worst case scenario, where technology fails and the internet is no more, all my links will be useless.

So I've decided to begin a library of downloaded info, stored on a low power PC with a DIY power supply.

As an example, it is my intention to construct a micro wind turbine, but like many of my intended projects, it is in the 'interesting and important, but not urgent' jobs queue. I've bookmarked some links for the project and even got one or two pdf's, but it's not complete by any means.

In the event of global breakdown, I believe our individual survival, safety and prosperity will depend on the local community, and what knowlege, experience and shared resources we can put together.

Currently, just about every aspect of known human knowlege is available at the click of a button. In the event of some kind of 'end times' scenario, I'd like to be able to provide my local community with a small part of some of the most useful bits of this information.

I've seen and downloaded one or two pdf/ebook compilations, which contain some good stuff but mostly garbage.

What would be your vote(s) for info, info sources, or info compilations, that can be d/l'd and stored offline?

[edit on 4/10/09 by RogerT]

"how to make friends and influence people" by dale carnegie.
that one is fun

I think your project is a good idea. I've transferred information to a flash drive, and also printed out quite a bit of info. That printed material is more than a ream of paper, and I keep it in a waterproof AquaPac bag with a couple of desiccant packets (very humid here).

Just off the top of my head some of the stuff I've stored that started out being just a bookmark:

Solar still/solar oven drawings
Kearny Fallout Meter
Bow/Atlatyl plans
Wind Generator Plans
Guide to cordage and basketweaving
List of emergency shortwave frequencies
Soapmaking formulaes
Seed storage info
Electrical diagrams
Snares and traps (many of these S&T I have yet to try out)
Homebrewing info (mostly recipes)

There's probably a few things I've forgotten that are in there; have been doing this for a few years. In addition to that, I have a couple of other waterproof bags that have treasured books -- Handbook of Chemistry & Physics, Family Bible, Dare to Prepare, Alternative Cures, Wildwood Wisdom, Accupressure/accupuncture, Holistic Health, Fearful Symmetry, etc.etc.etc.

All of this stuff survived Hurricane Paloma which hit us hard last November, even though our house took on quite a bit of water (wind drove the rain up under the metal roofing and down onto our ceiling, plus some seawater driven around the shutters and doors).

You could download the full wikipedia. I'd imagine it has just about everything in there you could think of

reply to post by RogerT

What would be your vote(s) for info, info sources, or info compilations, that can be d/l'd and stored offline?

Here is a list of pdfs I've compiled. If its garbage or not depends on what kind of info you are looking for. Some might be useful. some not.

www.4shared.com...

Physical documents are more sturdy, and more portable (assuming you're not trying to tote around the collected works of Shakespeare). A waterproof notebook and a grease pencil are easier to fit into a knapsack than a computer, and a lot less fragile. A laptop isn't a bad idea I suppose, but you should have physical backups.

If you're going to rely on a computer for SHTF-type situations, a Faraday Cage is a good insurance policy. It should protect your investment until such a time as it's needed. The construction plans would be a good document to add to your list as well (though it's very simple).

Originally posted by MegaCurious
You could download the full wikipedia. I'd imagine it has just about everything in there you could think of

Great idea. Any clue how to do that?

reply to post by PSUSA


Cool, I'll browse through and grab what pulls my interest. Thanks.

reply to post by argentus


Yeah, that's the kind of stuff (for starters).

Do you have any links/pdfs/docs to share?

good thread, i was just thinking about this.
I have found this en.wikipedia.org...
Somehwere it sais its 5g compressed 20g uncompressed.

Psusa how do i download all of those files

reply to post by RogerT




I wonder if you would be able to create a script or spider crawler that allowed you to open up wiki articles from a set keyword list capturing the articles automatically narrowing the relevance of the search.

I also suppose a page loader would go in conjunction but only brainstorming

This thread is interesting to me because I thought the same thing and actaully did create such a library and put it on a netbook with a solid state hard drive and lots of back up batteries and portable solar panels.

I love my kit though. I am a bit of a super kit freak in fact. I think I have at present 5 personal computers. 2 of them are hand held, 1 tablet PC, 1 Netbook and one big dual core laptop with a 17" screen. I can run all of my gear on batteries and solar. I did that about a year ago.

I collected a lot of my ebooks from torrent downloads. If you check out the ebook section of your favorite torrent search site you can find things like survival collections, technology books, computer how to books, and lots more. The second place I used for a lot of my ebook downloads was www.scribd.com... if you sign up for the service you can download most of the books on there as PDF files. I just ran searches for everything I was interested in and spent a few seeks searching through it and downloading everything I wanted.

I now officially have more than I could read in my lifetime. I figure if the internet goes down I have enough information to rebuild technological civilization from scratch out of the junk that survives SitX.

reply to post by sgrrsh26


One at a time.

Originally posted by WyrdeOne
Physical documents are more sturdy, and more portable (assuming you're not trying to tote around the collected works of Shakespeare). A waterproof notebook and a grease pencil are easier to fit into a knapsack than a computer, and a lot less fragile. A laptop isn't a bad idea I suppose, but you should have physical backups.

If you're going to rely on a computer for SHTF-type situations, a Faraday Cage is a good insurance policy. It should protect your investment until such a time as it's needed. The construction plans would be a good document to add to your list as well (though it's very simple).

I'm looking more at a community based idea, not a personal portable idea. But the Faraday cage is brilliant advice - I'm supposing this is to protect magnetic storage media in the case of destructive em waves?

reply to post by wayouttheredude


Brilliant. You've done pretty much exactly what I am planning.

I'm sure there would be many other people interested in this.

another thought would be to make sure we have the hardware to create a local intranet, which the info could be put up on, then anyone with a portable pc and independent electrical supply, could hook into it.

Mini-internets, on a community wide basis.

I would bet your personal library is awesome, but it's also biased to your views about what's important.
Getting a hard copy of the entire wikipedia would be pretty awesome as a start though, don't you think?

I have already begun building one of these. Over 33 gigs of ebooks and climbing. I plan on releasing a torrent or something once I'm done organizing it all.

I've also managed to buy a few 4gig usb drives that will hold the important survival guides on them. The only downside is that in the event of no electricity/computers/emp these things are all useless.

We should begin to brainstorm alternative information storing devices.

reply to post by patmac


Brilliant.

I thought this would be an idea many others have already had and worked on.

I hope the thread develops and becomes a decent discussion on how to find, organise, store and then re-transmit useful information, in the case of a global meltdown scenario.

Perhaps this would even be a cool website to set up. I have plenty of spare space on a dedicated server, ample bandwidth, and have just installed Moveable Type, so a 'blog based' user/community created and managed site could be up and running in very short order.

Obviously one possible intention of such a site would be to compile everything and then offer it as a downloadable package with an instruction manual

Anyone up for it?


[edit on 4/10/09 by RogerT]

I would make sure I had a physical copy of the most important documents in addition to having them stored on a computer or an external hard drive.

Print off whats needed and then laminate.

according to HalfPastHuman (Time monks, WebBot) they will attempt a curtail on the internet the second half of 2010 and will fail. The infrastructure apparently finds a way around what they try to do. There are too many intelligent hackers around who have already thought of it.




The government controls the internet backbone. Without it, there is no flow of information. They can restrict the flow of information at the firewall level so only their information passes through.

There is also "Internet 2", a superfast internet infrastructure between universities and the government. Extremely fast. There was lots of talk about it couple of years back. Maybe it is there and we are not allowed to use it.