Ask HN: What would you preserve if the internet were to go down tomorrow?
thought experiment: if the internet were to go down tomorrow for an indefinite period, what content would you most want to download and preserve?
- 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.
Where would you find this?
replace education in places without electricity with survival in case of civilization end.
Choose some reasonably good llm model + corpus of data to enhance the generation (e.g. wikipedia).
Package it in a long-lasting battery, rough device. Think of a tablet/laptop you would take deep into the desert for a multi-week trip.
/s
Include a key logger and a daemon to grab full screenshots every few seconds.
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.
My number one piece of advice for people learning this stuff: Nursing home activity staff know who the residents are who grew up on farms and in the country and are DESPERATE for volunteers. Go to a home and ask to spend time with those residents. That's what I do. It's how I learned most of the wild craft skills I have. The residents love it, it helps the community, and you learn.
Your county extension probably has all the guides in print form for you, generally for free.
The farm animal and plant guides are in the resources for new farmers. They're buried and I can't find them back, but they're there.
- 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
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.
It can lead to much more varied and interesting discussion that direct questions, if you're willing to get over the non-literalness.
Like asking: "If you could meet one celebrity in person which Kardashian would it be?"
How so? There are long-term digital storage technologies that would long outlast any book and are many orders of magnitude denser.
If it's digital storage, you have to have electricity, a compatible device, an understanding of the storage, and software that can read it.
And, increasingly, DRM servers that will allow you to read it.
Any digital storage device is simply giving you a bit stream. Being able to read the bits at all might rely upon technology that no longer exists. You need to know the layout of the medium, where to start reading, how to perform any built-in error correcting, what constitutes data versus metadata. Once you read the bits, you still need to do all of that again, but this time at the level of the filesystem. Then you need to do it a third time at the level of the file format. Then you get, at best, something like a consecutive sequence of unicode code points. Now you still need to know unicode.
We have no idea if these sorts of technologies will be remembered in 3,000 years, but given the history, there's a very good chance people will still be able to read Sanskrit and Latin, and the way the human eyeball accepts and decodes light waves will not change.
If the humans of the future are all blind, I think we can forget about worrying about preserving civilization.
Nothing has been verified to work beyond 50 years, and those with data errors and failure rates.
There are those CDs made out of rock, but they have never veen proven to pass the test of time.
You're saying that something that has existed for less than 50 years doesn't count because we haven't been able to actually test it for more than 50 years, even though we understand the physics behind it and can theoretically predict how long it will last...
And a quick google reveals a lot of people are very worried about counterfeit disks too.
Ubiquitous access to reader devices is also a factor, and I can’t actually think of anything that fits that bill.
As for ubiquitous access, store a reading device or instructions on how to build one along with the data. If you're unable to do that, then I doubt you would be able to keep a massive library of books around for very long either.
There's also no financial incentive to build technologies like this. If the world actually got together and tried to build long-term digital storage then I'm sure we could come up with something even better.
An interesting technology, but also not exactly something I could get at my local Best Buy today.
M-DISC, assuming it's writable using consumer Blu-Ray writers, is promising though – Blu-Ray drives can probably still considered ubiquitous enough in a pinch.
> DNA storage
DNA is in fact extremely unstable unless it's part of living organisms that constantly error-correct and replicate it, and even then you have random mutations.
If humans were serious about protecting knowledge, they'd put these libraries on Svalbard or in Antarctica, or better yet in a lava tube on the Moon.
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.
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
My only problem with LTO5 tapes is the amount required to do backup. Were I going to do LTO, I'd have to go with LTO9 since they hold 18/45TB and are around $90 a tape.
I waited for years for used datacenter tape drives to become affordable. The math for DVD or hard drive cold storage didn't make sense, especially since I like redundant backups so it's 2x the cost. Tapes were designed for cold storage and it's faster and more cost effective than backing up to hard drives. Maybe I'll change my tune someday after a tape unravelling disaster if that ever happens, but in 2 years it's been pretty reliable.
Huh? I just bought some 10TB refurb drives from Amazon for $60 each.
A typical SATA HDD, by contrast, can be connected to any common consumer-grade motherboard, or you can just get a USB HDD dock if you really need to.
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.
What processor do you have?
I'm almost never CPU constrained, so I tend to have everything idled down as much as possible.
Edit: and just for context, opening firefox and browsing the web right now has me at 9W.
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.
You will be unable to communicate except through face to face meetings. There is no more POTS(plain old telephone system), the entire world routes phone calls over the internet. There's no IM, the physical mail system will at least become dramatically backlogged if not fail entirely due to infrastructure failure internally and the new increased demand.
In my country is it not just that there isn't a POTS system, there isn't even copper. You have a FTTH(fiber to the home) link or a mobile connection. To my knowledge even in the US fiber terminates at the distribution point and your cable supply is last mile only.
I don't know what even will cause a global internet outage at the scale but it will be global panic.
A coordinated attack on key infrastructure (eg: root DNS servers) could do it. Much of the internet is held together with duct tape and bubble gum. The reason it stays alive is because there are a lot of duct tape and bubble gum specialists :)
There are still a lot of ways to communicate without the internet over large distances (eg: radio, satellite, plane, drone, etc...) and there are different considerations/requirements for them. They are still an ultimate backup to the world we have created but shopping on Amazon via ham-radio would be quite painful!
Grocery stores and bars used to let local trusted customers pay their accumulated purchases once per week or month, or accept personal checks from them without any means of verifying whether they were covered.
Today? It’s essentially cash or credit card, and no more mechanisms for local/decentralized credit decisions whatsoever, even if a checkout clerk might personally know a customer.
Because of ubiquitous connectivity, we have greatly increased, but also centralized trust. Local trust isn’t restored quickly, especially during an emergency when tensions are high anyway.
Ie: maybe I trust a mechanism by Google/Apple where tap becomes powered locally and the phone/device itself carries a balance.
It’s true that these solutions don’t exist today but they are not far away with the amount of pressure we are talking about by losing the internet.
Also, credit cards used to work in a similar way to checks. The information would be recorded and the transaction would be finalized later.
I came across a pre-magnetic-strip credit card years ago… it’s pretty fascinating how currency has evolved in the last half-century. There is no reason for me to think that it will stop where we are at today.
1. ATM machines may stop working.
2. Your local bank branch may have issues knowing how much money you have on your account, making it hard to manually give you cash.
Both can be great issues, but can be worked around with a bit of time to prepare. Do you see other issues?
i do beleive though that it would be only a temporary thing.
on a local level you can likely still enable a lot of stuff. the internet would most likely die due to a decision to disable it rather than mass equipment failure. also very unlikely, as a ton of people must disable it at the same time, knowing all full well the result of doing so...
if they do that so u can try to get a radio broadcast up with some equipment thats strapped to houses and appartment buildings eveywhere these days. see if some antennas can be enabled for telephony locally etc. get the spark going for getting a network back up. for isp equipment the same. you can enable and if needed reprogram/configure a lot of field equipment and enable local networks. perhaps depending on your locality even more (internet exchange and isp data centers are close to some people atleast).
quite sure it would be up and running again in no time locally. at some point networks would merge and an internet would form again...
all in all there's really not a lot anyone can do about it if people want to use these existing networks and equipment. unless they start cutting power to very large areas etc. etc., remove the equipment everywhere, or ourposefuly destroy it... - this line of thought is extremely unrealistic.
And how do we know that someone's pocket computer doesn't contain a forged list of transactions that never happened, or is missing some transactions that did happen?
It's not that long ago that software was distributed on CD and tutorials in printed books. The internet adds a lot of convenience and productivity, but it's hardly a requirement.
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.
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.
I wish we could preserve old school network engineers instead
It's funny that in times with "two big cisco core routers with hand written config" system were way more stable compared to now when everything is documented and built by "best practices".
* 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.
The perspective on this changes if you stop being a consumer, and start being an author.
The people that download the book from these sites would never have bought them. Having your book downloaded by 10k people doesn't mean you've lost 10k sales, what it does mean is that you've got up to 10k people that wouldn't have bought the book anyway talking about it, effectively becoming word of mouth advertisers.
This isn't quiet as true for movies/tv series etc, because their value (entertainment time/price) is so much lower. Books on the other have usually cost $5-30 and will take 4-30 hours to read through. At that price point, very very few people will download the books to save what amounts to a single meal. Especially if you consider that so few people actually read several books per year (that's essentially $<30 per year "saved" via illegal downloads)
It could become an issue if a for-profit company could serve them legally however, I agree with that. It's hard to really talk about that, though ... It's a pure what-if/speculation after all
How many of those 10k purchases didn’t buy it because it was available for free somewhere? The point is, as you said, you don’t know.. However we do know the opposite is true, once Napster went away people started paying for Pandora. Netflix password crackdown lead to increased subscriptions.
When your desirable product isn’t available for free, people will trend towards buying it.
I often download books before buying them because I otherwise have no reasonable means to judge their content. This is not much different from flipping through the pages of a book in a library before buying it. The appeal of reading from an actual physical book is not something that any digital form can replace, so the book being available in digital form won't stop me from buying a copy. I also have no interest in Kindles and DRM.
Music, on the other hand, might be a different story except for select audiophiles who prefer vinyl.
So I don't think we can generalize to "product" like you do in your argument. Details and facts actually matter.
Corey Doctorow has the right idea. <sic> “I give my works away for free. Every time I gain another fan I gain another person who might want to own the hardback of my new book.”
If your desirable product is available for free more people find you, like you, follow you, patronize you. A lot of those people have money and are happy to give it to you to support you continuing to make good work.
This distribution problem doesn't really exist with books at the moment as Kindle exists.
What is the algebraic empty solution to "all" again? I can't remember if you are right.
Source: I'm an author.
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.
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.
If you would like to begin preparing for your tomorrows, this is a good place to start: https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/
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.
- 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.
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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.
All that to mainly say..I appreciate you. It's one of my favorite projects, and I hope it keeps going strong indefinitely.
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.
I agree! That's the knee-jerk reaction from people caught up in the disinformation. There is truth, and we all have received ontologies - you've received yours from 4chan. The point of disinformation is not to persuade you about a lie, but to paralyze the public by taking away truth, discussion, consensus. You and I can't discuss any factual truth because of your ontology.
> what people said when they felt they could express themselves honestly
If they agreed with the 4chan (etc) received ontology. For example, what I wrote would get the same reaction you gave me, though much more aggressively and dismissively. People were only honest as far as it agreed with the ontology; beyond that they lied or went someplace else.
> humor is a more reliable signal for truth than official consensus any day
I'm not surprised to see that. IMHO it's nonsense rhetoric - means nothing, sounds good. Right from 4chan / reddit / etc.
> I think they captured something essential.
Agreed. They are special places, but not for any sort of factual truth.
> they were the vox populi
They are only narrow subsets of the public.
the difference between a natural and recieved ontology is like a received pronunciation, people use it because they were told to use it for in-group signaling, and not as the effect of competence, principle, or experience. the people who are affectedly concerned about disinformation aren't reasoning from base reality or experience, they are iterating a logic of ideas used for in-group signaling. one of those ideas equates criticism with competence.
a received ontology is an affect, whereas a natural ontology is an effect. a mind that can't tell the difference between effect and affect is not equipped to apprehend the consequences of experience or competence, or of an ontology derived from it. it operates on representations and believes others do because that's the depth of its own experience, its consciousness exists on a substrate of languge and material symbols navigated by criticism. in a word, godless.
the beauty of sites like reddit, 4chan, and related ones is that for all their astroturfing, they accumulate honesty that people managing a hegemonic narrative persona can't allow to exist. disinformation and conspiracy theories exist, but I would argue the perspective that problematizes them is just an in-group affectation.
Who will keep reading after you say something ignorant, offensive, and fabricated like this? Again, you seem to have learned the lesson of propaganda: Shut down discourse.
But there are a lot of knock-off channels, which you're presumably referring to, where people build things that are basically mini-castles, and pools filled with water using a pipe network, etc. And those are definitely at least partially fake.
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.
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.
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.
Are not data provided by OpenStreetMap?
Anyway in case of no-internet something like Organic Maps would work better then apps with login.
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.
My Steam collection won't work because it needs the Internet and DRM to work.
[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.
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 they don't, digital storage is utterly worthless.
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.
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.
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)
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.
"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"
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
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?
Whether I can rely on the information I get is a good point, but it seems like we as a society struggle with that just as much with the internet as without. Forced decentralization through broken connections may have played as much of a positive role in preserving the integrity of information as it was a negative.
Beyond that, how does the studio receive information? By say phone? SMS?
Again depends what “the internet” means
The original question, though, was what would I preserve, and news was an example of something that can't be backed up ahead of time.
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 ;-)
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.
- 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.