You can do the same nowadays. Mirror Wikipedia, download maps for your navigation app, grab a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain (ugh), use Git to clone a plethora of repos, and so on. Great for if you have an airgapped environment. You can even set it up so you never have profiling. The beauty of this specific example is its mostly text, so you can very quickly grab a lot of data, and nobody's gonna figure out which specific you (in this case) read.