18 ms·

Ask HN: What would you preserve if the internet were to go down tomorrow?

• lesostep 2y ago
  I already preserved the single most important pdf I have: the postWW2 book listing all wild edible plants in the area I live in. With notations and pictures!
• wafflemaker 2y ago
  pr0n, and make a lot of money selling it!
  • iosdl 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • casualbrowsing 2y ago
    [dead]
• overu589 2y ago
  I have downloaded nearly 2TB in archives from the interweb, just in case the whole civilization thing were to “go down tomorrow.” If you would like to begin preparing for your tomorrows, this is a good place to start: https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/ https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/
• bearjaws 2y ago
  llama 3.1 405b - You get a massive wealth of knowledge that effectively can act as your Google. 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.
  • casualbrowsing 2y ago
    [dead]
  • Gooblebrai 2y ago
    And what do you need to run the inference of llama 3.1 405b?
• orionblastar 2y ago
  I already downloaded collections of various ROMs for use in emulators along with the emulators to use them. These ROMs don't need the Internet and have no DRM in the emulators. My Steam collection won't work because it needs the Internet and DRM to work.
  • dberst 2y ago
    I've used the emulator "Retroarch" on the Steam Deck and had good success playing with it in offline mode. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it's been a great fit for me
• big-green-man 2y ago
  Libgen, Anna's archive, xlib and scihub. All OSM data and openaddresses data.
• Jupe 2y ago
  Apologies, but this strikes me as a rather silly question. What I would keep in the event of a prolonged network outage would be of minimal significance. 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.
  • bruce511 2y ago
    You're not wrong. If the internet fails for everyone (at least at the city level) then basically there's no banking. 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.
    • imoverclocked 2y ago
      I think that there is a lot of merit to your argument. However, I think there is also the human factor as well as a malleable technology factor. I'll speak to the second factor. 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.
      • woleium 2y ago
        not right now we don’t, imagine trying to make software without the internet.
        • wongarsu 2y ago
          My autocomplete and documentation work offline. Not being able to download new libraries would suck, but as long as you have the necessary tools installed it wouldn't be too bad. 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.
• WantonQuantum 2y ago
  I'm surprised no one has said Wikipedia yet.
  • orionblastar 2y ago
    You can download Wikipedia using instructions on this website: https://www.howtogeek.com/260023/how-to-download-wikipedia-for-offline-at-your-fingertips-reading/ https://www.howtogeek.com/260023/how-to-download-wikipedia-f...
    • dberst 2y ago
      When I did this a number of years ago, and it was only around 5-6GB, or about 20GB with all the images. I also added about 4GB for windows, android, iOS, Linux, and Mac OS apps to parse/view the data. All of that fits on a 32GB flashdrive that I used to keep on my keychain but currently is in my glove compartment I think. 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
      • syndicatedjelly 2y ago
        People talk about investing in physical gold for an economic meltdown, I think stacks of microSD cards with the full contents of Wikipedia and a Netflix archive is worth orders of magnitude more in the event of a catastrophe
        • NateEag 2y ago
          Maybe, but only if computers survive in a usable form. If they don't, digital storage is utterly worthless.
        • 2y ago
• elashri 2y ago
  Wikipedia, Sci-hub, Anna's archive and Library Genesis. This is the sites that contains a significant part of humanity knowledge that will be needed.
  • readyplayernull 2y ago
    Textfiles.com, OEIS.
  • glimshe 2y ago
    Most of these sites being illegal says something about our laws. But I'd add GitHub to your list.
    • self_awareness 2y ago
      > Most of these sites being illegal says something about our laws. The perspective on this changes if you stop being a consumer, and start being an author.
      • marcosdumay 2y ago
        You mean... all those people that got rich writing knowledge-heavy books disagree with the GP? What is the algebraic empty solution to "all" again? I can't remember if you are right.
      • elashri 2y ago
        At least for one of the websites in this lis, no it does not as you don't gain anything from the money that the users pay. And frankly some people will email you asking you to send them your work for free and you will happily do that.
      • ffsm8 2y ago
        If it does, then the author is sadly misguided and got convinced of someone that isn't true. 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
• signaru 2y ago
  My personal/work files for which the physical media of origin no longer exists. Source codes, mine and of others that I care about. Compilers. Lots of books and Wikipedia.
• inquisitor27552 2y ago
  [flagged]
• aaron695 2y ago
  [dead]
• imoverclocked 2y ago
  More than downloading a bunch of information, I would also think about hoarding computers that might last a long time if taken care of... along with a durable power source that doesn't require fossil fuels. (eg: This potentially includes gasification based generators) 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.
  • neverartful 2y ago
    "computers that might last a long time if taken care of" Any examples? Do all computers have capacitors that will die within a certain number of years?
    • imoverclocked 2y ago
      Avoiding electrolytic caps is a good start for sure. There are plenty of boards out there without them. 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.
• tiznow 2y ago
  Basically every historical/political analysis of turmoil every publically available US Army pdf I can find.
  • mmooss 2y ago
    If that's all you read, then I'd expect that you will find turmoil and create more. I'd read about the things humanity actually wants to do and benefits from. 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.
    • fullstackchris 2y ago
      I too, fail to see the infatuation people have with revolution / zombie apocalypse / <insert dystopian thing here>... But, people have been trying to predict the end of the world since antiquity so there's that
• jpc0 2y ago
  Define internet here. 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.
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    Agree. If we could time-travel back to 1985 then fine, I would miss very little about the modern internet. 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.
    • toofy 2y ago
      the real horror would be if it were to happen in 20 years or so, if it were to happen in the near future we still have people around who remember how things were done before computers. 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.
• hulitu 2y ago
  > Ask HN: What would you preserve if the internet were to go down tomorrow? Surveillance. That's the main purpose, isn't it ? /s
• GianFabien 2y ago
  MDN Plus. For some weird reason we can't get the offline version in Australia, but it is available in New Zealand.
• the5avage 2y ago
  All the papers and books of library genesis
• fsflover 2y ago
  This is a good question and the same one, which Archive Team is trying to answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41141349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41141349
• notorandit 2y ago
  The GNU project as a whole and Linux kernel. And maybe RISC-V stuff.
• andrewstuart 2y ago
  Nothing. Nothing at all.
• LinuxBender 2y ago
  thought experiment: if the internet were to go down tomorrow for an indefinite period, what content would you most want to download and preserve? 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.
• 486sx33 2y ago
  Actually nothing. Books, dvds, and blu rays They are important, and slowly being lost to time and produced less and less …
• gmuslera 2y ago
  The devil is in the details. 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.
• Tepix 2y ago
  There are plenty of wikipedia backups. That would be my first thought. But also i would download some LLMs that i can't use right now.
• edanm 2y ago
  I mean, it's not a practical answer to your question, but I'd love a backup of YouTube. I think it's probably got most of humanity's knowledge in there somewhere, in all kinds of forms for all kinds of levels.
• jareklupinski 2y ago
  as many AI models as i can get my hands on, to generate content for me 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)
  • motohagiography 2y ago
    there's a plausible incentive where a generation of models gets trained up to provide what most people will want, and then destroying the "old" internet behind it to prevent things like regime-derailing memes to ever happen again.
    • jareklupinski 2y ago
      i'll rememeber
• garyfirestorm 2y ago
  Pypi
• Johnny555 2y ago
  I'm surprised nobody said "porn" given how much traffic those sites drive -- is offline porn still easy to find? Last time I looked for offline porn, it was at the local video rental store in the back room section that said "Adults only", but now those stores are long gone. Are those "Lingerie and Adult Toys" stores on the outskirts of town filled with DVD's and magazines?
  • NeoTar 2y ago
    At least in the gay community there are still hundreds of DVDs available from physical stores. I did wonder how long that will last though. Of course the relevant stores will not be very common.
  • Clamchop 2y ago
    yt-dlp works for more sites than just YouTube :)
  • joseda-hg 2y ago
    As mentioned on another comment, yt-dlp works, Depending on how deep you want to go, there's a lot to grab 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
• LeoPanthera 2y ago
  I have an interest in historical television, and YouTube has become the default location for other collectors to upload rips of VHS tapes and other formats of captured broadcasts. 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.
  • icpmacdo 2y ago
    Can you link some of the best youtube channels for those?
    • LeoPanthera 2y ago
      Here's a few vaguely topical ones for Hacker News. BBC Archive: https://www.youtube.com/@BBCArchive https://www.youtube.com/@BBCArchive AT&T Archives: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDB8B8220DEE96FD9 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDB8B8220DEE96FD9 BBC Computer Literacy Project (UK only?): https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk The Computer Chronicles: https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles Blue OS Museum: https://www.youtube.com/@BlueOSMuseum https://www.youtube.com/@BlueOSMuseum
  • musha68k 2y ago
    It's amazing how much cheaper spinning disks have gotten over the years. We should all be archiving more IMO.
    • leptons 2y ago
      Spinning disks are kind of expensive. I'm paying about $3.00/TB for LTO5 tape. The cheapest refurb hard drives are still about $15/TB.
      • mathgeek 2y ago
        It's great that both are relatively cheap as they both have their advantages and use cases. Mostly depends on how "hot" your archives need to be.
• pryelluw 2y ago
  I went through this already. Lived through a category 5 hurricane that took out the power grid, and antennas (among many other key infrastructure). 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.
  • sourcecodeplz 2y ago
    I would invest in an M Macbook just for this reason, that battery life is insane even with wi-fi on, imagine no connectivity, should pass 15 hours.
    • pryelluw 2y ago
      At the time (2017), I was using an intel 2012 MacBook. Battery life was fine. The biggest challenge was not having a useful local search engine. It has prompted me to download lots of models and run them with ollama. I create local knowledge bases. This greatly augments the strategy.
    • mattpallissard 2y ago
      The latest Lenovo P14s I have running Arch/sway has a crazy long battery life as well. It idles at 3.4W with wifi on. Writing code with an editor and all the fancy LSPS/plugins pushes me to 4W. I can get more than a full days worth of work on a single charge if I'm not doing anything compute heavy. That said, it's not out of box like a Macbook.
      • pryelluw 2y ago
        Good to know. I’m looking to transition into a Linux laptop setup and have been looking into power efficient setups. What processor do you have?
• whartung 2y ago
  I guess the hot tip is to dig out the O'Reilly UUCP and Netnews book, and see if any of the phone modems still work. MacOS still ships with uucico and uucp. 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.
• epirogov 2y ago
  opensuse disk to restore civilisation :D
• motohagiography 2y ago
  4chan, reddit, and HN because they were humanity's only honest repositories. linkedin might be useful as our species' first attempt to create a simulation and to generate a a set of things people in an economy do. we could probably rebuild civilization just from 3blue1brown.
  • stonethrowaway 2y ago
    Primitive Tech is more useful than 3B1B from that perspective.
    • NeoTar 2y ago
      Allegedly primitive tech is at least partially fake - they use heavy equipment off screen to build their projects.
      • pavel_lishin 2y ago
        The specific youtube channel Primitive Technology [1] definitely does not. John Plant does everything as you see, although he does have the benefit of doing research - he doesn't do things as people in the past have done, but as they might have done had they known things he does. But there's no tricks and no machinery. (And of course, some of what he's able to do is dependent on his environment - the plants he uses aren't around my part of the world. 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. https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550 https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550
  • casualbrowsing 2y ago
    [dead]
  • mmooss 2y ago
    > 4han, reddit, and HN because they were humanity's only honest repositories 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.
• rossdavidh 2y ago
  Well most of YouTube I can easily do without, but there are a lot of good demonstrations of crafts and repairs on there that are way easier to understand than a text explanation of the same thing. If "indefinite" means "it may be that society's ability to send you stuff and fix what you have goes away for a while", I would want an archive of a lot of that. But it's <1% of the YT content, so I'm not sure if there's a good way to filter for just that.
• paulcole 2y ago
  None of it. If the Internet is down, society is fucked to the point that archiving a few websites isn’t going to make a lick of difference.
• pxc 2y ago
  In just one day?? Geez. 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?
• shafyy 2y ago
  No doubt: Wikipedia
  • AlienRobot 2y ago
    Fun fact: you can download Wikipedia and sell copies of it :-D
• AlienRobot 2y ago
  The documentation for all the programming languages and libraries I use, and if possible all forum posts them (and the entirety of stackoverflow). Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley so I can rick roll people on the post-internet era. Newgrounds.
• syngrog66 2y ago
  [flagged]
• mid-kid 2y ago
  a full copy of the slackware source code: fits in 10gb, contains a semi-curated set of applications and utilities for nearly any purpose, including their documentation, without trying to include everything. I throw this on any system I want to forget about, and I rarely need to add any additional software.
  • b112 2y ago
    I do the same thing, but woth debian. These are good choices.
• TacticalCoder 2y ago
  The Bitcoin blockchain history.
  • zamadatix 2y ago
    What's the utility when the internet is down indefinitely? Nostalgia?
    • hackable_sand 2y ago
      Revenge, probably.
• runjake 2y ago
  I’m already doing this, but: - 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.
  • nachox999 2y ago
    "Download every US Army field manual", never thought of that, seems useful
  • digdugdirk 2y ago
    How much space does this take? Both digitally and physically, for the stuff you have in print form?
    • runjake 2y ago
      <1 TB. I try to keep the entirety of my important files in under 1tb and so far, I have succeeded. Somehow I've managed to do this even with my photo/video iCloud Photo library. I am not counting large hoards like my ISO and movie collections. 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)
      • deivid 2y ago
        Is this the libgen fiction mirror or some other large collection?
• oceanplexian 2y ago
  Probably shelf stable food, firearms, hard currency like gold and silver. For information the books I already have (Classic literature, engineering references, cook books). Honestly, computers would be the last thing I care about even though it’s both my hobby and my career. 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.
• defanor 2y ago
  I do store and update backups of public information regularly, since losing access to much of the Internet completely is not such a remote possibility here; many resources are blocked already, both proxying services and protocols are being blocked as well. Storing those backups together with personal data backups. 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.
• a2128 2y ago
  A few years ago I was concerned of this being a genuine possibility (at least for a few months) due to regional conflicts, so I prepared the following on some SD cards and flash drives: * 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.
  • eacnamn 2y ago
    Does your Wikipedia mirror include media? Text-only wiki seems a bit bleak to me, but including all media would devour so much storage, I just haven't been able to justify using that much of my limited storage space
    • rightbyte 2y ago
      It would be nice if there was some 'horribly compressed media' dump. Like, I can live with '96 pic resolutions for an offline copy.
  • can16358p 2y ago
    I agree with you, and it's not only about rich and Western countries: you might be rich and have a stable Internet connection, but would like to stay totally offline too, which is very hard (if you just want to watch YT videos on something when offline etc) nowadays.
  • rmunn 2y ago
    yt-dlp still works fine for me. Used it just today to download some videos for later offline watching. How have they been restricting it?
• nickpsecurity 2y ago
  BibleHub.com, GotQuestions.org, and BiblicalTraining.org for spiritual truth. 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.
• mythrwy 2y ago
  YouTube how-to videos.
• fatih-erikli-cg 2y ago
  Nothing if my favorite programming language is installed in my pc. I make the computer fun for myself. Internet doesnt bring anything.
• robin_reala 2y ago
  I produce books[1] for Standard Ebooks.[2] I’ve got a fifty-long list of books-to-do-at some point, so grabbing transcriptions from Gutenberg and scans from archive.org for each would keep me busy for a long time, presumably long enough for the internet to heal whatever state it’s got itself into. [1] https://www.robinwhittleton.com/books/ https://www.robinwhittleton.com/books/ [2] https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/
  • ericra 2y ago
    Having produced only a single book for standardebooks, I don't think many people appreciate the amount of effort that goes into the corrections, semantic html additions, and other edits it takes to go from a typical Gutenberg file to a standardebooks release. Granted, the tool chain you guys have created is great and is immensely helpful. All that to mainly say..I appreciate you. It's one of my favorite projects, and I hope it keeps going strong indefinitely.
• tmtvl 2y ago
  A bunch of content currently on YouTube: the Perl conference, European Lisp Symposium, Strange Loop, Peter Hadfield's (Potholer54) videos,... 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.
• animuchan 2y ago
  First thing that comes to mind is the entirety of 3blue1brown, it's brilliant. 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.
• rsync 2y ago
  The diy (home improvement?) stack exchange.
• 23B1 2y ago
  Absolutely none of it. I don't think we are markedly better off as a species because of it. 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.
• analog31 2y ago
  My bicycle.
• 7952 2y ago
  Photos of my family. Lots of comforting audio books and movies. Recipes of simple food for a wide range of ingredients.
• INTPenis 2y ago
  How much would it hurt if you lost all your family photos in one day? 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.
  • eternityforest 2y ago
    I have a small folder for my important stuff, mirrored on on all my devices with SyncThing, backed up from my phone to Google with FolderSync, and from my laptop to the NAS with Kopia. 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.
• codr7 2y ago
  Real life?
• sandwichsphinx 2y ago
  The entire library of google scholar
• sebbu 2y ago
  I don't think I saw OpenStreetMaps in the lists provided by various people in this thread. I rely on GPS a lot, and having a local one would help greatly (preferably on phone, but still). 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.
  • silverliver 2y ago
    Even without GPS, I imagine osm would still prove invaluable in saving lives during a disaster. I wish there was a simple, portable, plug-and-play solution for downloading and viewing maps on Linux/Desktop computers.
    • RicoElectrico 2y ago
      Weren't it for the fact the current UI is intended more for debug and development (as opposed to Android and iOS versions), Organic Maps would be cool.
• throwaway9567 2y ago
  Friendly reminder that the Internet Archive is accepting donations. In light of recent attacks causing operational issues for the archive, additional funding will likely be well spent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41854518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41854518
• breck 2y ago
  [dead]
• anticorporate 2y ago
  Honestly, very little if anything. 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.
  • chgs 2y ago
    Depends what “internet is down” means, but are you sure radio will carry news? 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?
    • anticorporate 2y ago
      Having recently lived through a natural disaster, the radio carried local news, which was all I cared about at the time. (Transmission overall was harmed by storm damage, but the local station had direct access to at least a few of their towers.) 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.
      • chgs 2y ago
        For now. Our transmitters have links via isdn from the studios. Isdn goes away soon. Beyond that, how does the studio receive information? By say phone? SMS? Again depends what “the internet” means
• giantg2 2y ago
  Nothing. Start over from scratch.
• latentsea 2y ago
  Soft White Underbelly
• more_corn 2y ago
  There should probably be a backup of stack overflow, if only because it’d be hard to get it back if it ever goes down.
• asdz 2y ago
  If Internet go down, likely the electricity is out. So likely we need some power source first, maybe I'll get solar and batteries first. Then I'll get some doomsday movies / zombie movies :)
• Havoc 2y ago
  Enough to ensure I can get a basic homelab started and all the tech I need to deploy an LLM. 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
• Titan2189 2y ago
  I really hope this is just a thought experiment and not a 'hint hint' by someone who knows more about what will happen in 2 days after the US 2024 presidential election. 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.
• dgellow 2y ago
  MSDN, I feel it would be a great time to finally do all the side projects I ever wanted, and lots of them are related to windows APIs :) Not to save it for future generation, just for myself. Also, a bunch of dev related git repos, such as zig, rust, microsft/stl, python
• praving5 2y ago
  I have literally zero dependency on the Internet. Everything I value (family and event photos, music, books (hard copies), school report cards, ID cards, etc.) is already with me in hard copies or hard drive. If Internet were to go down, I believe, I will breathe happily!!
• midtake 2y ago
  The Debian mirror
• thot_experiment 2y ago
  Warcraft 3, Quake 3. We're set.
• pvaldes 2y ago
  Save a frozen copy of current knowledge before the AI starts to corrupt every fact with very convincing fake data. Does not sound totally unreasonable.
• gloosx 2y ago
  If globally internet goes does tomorrow the only thing we need to preserve is Networking For Dummies book. In exactly seven days we would have local networks restored with all the content imaginable travelling through gigabit channels between peers. 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.
  • jesterson 2y ago
    Networking for dummies cane create dummy networks. I wish we could preserve old school network engineers instead
    • borlox 2y ago
      “old school” as in: two big cisco core routers with hand written config and no further documentation?
      • zamadatix 2y ago
        I'm glad we've come a long way in the last ~25 years: 2 <random brand> routers with hand written config and no documentation!
      • jesterson 2y ago
        I guess I see where you are coming from. 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".
• jeff_vader 2y ago
  English Wikipedia and some Linux distribution which can be downloaded as a full set of packages + sources.
• RecycledEle 2y ago
  Books, how-to videos, and programs that run without an Internet connection.
• jesterson 2y ago
  I am already doing it as internet is pretty much going down. Downloading music, some great movies, books. For other content I have DevonThink database
• lynguist 2y ago
  Honestly, I wouldn’t mind. I would continue and live my life. I would ride public transportation to go to work, I would go to the library if I want to check something out, I would just be spontaneous instead of preplanning everything online or be influenced by opinions online.
  • dkdbejwi383 2y ago
    > I would ride public transportation 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.
• wanderingmind 2y ago
  Survival youtube videos, ranging from growing crops, to building a home, building a boat, predicting weather, to fixing guns
• dicjsnw 2y ago
  OnlyFans
• openrisk 2y ago
  Since everybody else would try to preserve what is really important, I would go for a random sample. So that future archeologists can form their own opinions about what this era was really about.
  • kjellsbells 2y ago
    Archaeologists love middens (trash heaps) as they provide a cross section of stuff that a society used. I wonder what they will make of our landfills? "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"
• black_13 2y ago
  [dead]
• karel-3d 2y ago
  Do you think preserve for future historians, or for my immediate use in an apocalypse? 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.
  • timeon 2y ago
    > Mapy.cz, local Czech map provider data Are not data provided by OpenStreetMap? Anyway in case of no-internet something like Organic Maps would work better then apps with login.
    • karel-3d 2y ago
      No, they have their own data sources for Czech Republic and they are very thorough.
• aa-jv 2y ago
  If the Internet went down tomorrow, I'd finally have time to organize the 90,000+ .PDF files I have collected over 3 decades, of every single web article I've read and printed to .PDF for later reading/reference. 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
• kissgyorgy 2y ago
  Wikipedia, GitHub and YouTube should have enough to recover most knowledge about the world today.
• tjbiddle 2y ago
  Honestly, I think we're at the point now where if the internet went down it'd cause a pretty heavy collapse of society. I'd be less worried about having stored content and more worried about not being able to access my money, businesses not being able to operate, friends and family being unable to communicate, being unable to travel back home, etc. 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.
• nprateem 2y ago
  Why don't you just come straight out and ask people to raise their hand if they're paranoid? Or is this a way to flag people who don't know they are?
• vitiral 2y ago
  This is my project: https://civboot.org https://civboot.org
• delegate 2y ago
  For a global catastrophe situation (WW3, asteroid) with worst case scenario consequences, here's what comes to mind: - 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.
• Yawrehto 2y ago
  There are a few categories here, ranked in rough order of how much I want them between and within categories, assuming infinite storage space and the ability to read the format that it's in. 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.
• GTP 2y ago
  I won't contribute links to resouces, as in this thread there are many users that have listed everything I would have, plus more. I'll just recommend the Kiwix app[0], which is a convenient way of downloading many of the resources suggested by others, and keep those handy. That is, assuming you have a way of keeping your smartphone charged ;) [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixmobile https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwi...
• dusted 2y ago
  Just the things I already keep updated local mirrors of. 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.
• barryrandall 2y ago
  I'd preserve the arguments against IPv4, SMTP, and BGP.
• nachox999 2y ago
  Mr Bean videos
• Kalanos 2y ago
  - Scientific literature - Wikipedia articles - YouTube videos - Google images
• theBaba 2y ago
  https://zombo.com https://zombo.com - You can do anything at zombo com
• elnatro 2y ago
  Im case of a catastrophe, wouldn’t be better to rely on non-tech storage of information? Like books, for example? And if so, what printed books would be better for this purpose? Encyclopedias?
• kcartlidge 2y ago
  > What would you preserve if the internet were to go down tomorrow? Nothing. I'd be too busy celebrating. (Even though I'd likely be out of work.)
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  The physical addresses of data/code sources to use for sneakernet transfers while the internet is down. 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".
• jonathanMelly 2y ago
  human proved to be able to live without Internet using other kinds of nets... It’s just a new situation, a change I bet we can handle... Nothing, let it go down ;-)
• pacificleo12 2y ago
  9gag
• throwaway_4lyfe 2y ago
  I'd look for a document called something like "How To Build A New Internet When The Existing One Has Just Gone Down Indefinitely".
  • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    That's pretty much the RFCs, isn't it?
• thuruv 2y ago
  This thread has an utmost importance among other few HN threads and I couldn't grasp why this hasn't gained much traction yet. Our focus should be developing tools that supports the sharing/communication of the people/repositories of information spread across multiple places and accessible (the very meaning of internet, since www days). Totally worth noting the internet is "Too big to fail" yet the purpose should not be diverging on how to not only restore but to connect when/if it fails to.
• edsonmedina 2y ago
  In all honesty: my sanity
• revskill 2y ago
  Linux kernel 1.0
• Hammad_khaan 2y ago
  If the internet disappeared tomorrow, I’d save Alex Hormozi’s sales advice. His content on sales is like a survival kit—he emphasizes that mastering sales is a skill that keeps you secure no matter what. As they say, if you know how to sell, you’ll never go hungry.
• cableshaft 2y ago
  I got most of what I need on hard drives already. Have plenty of movies and music and games, I keep a copy of everything in Dropbox on each computer, and I don’t need to download anything special to work on game development in Monogame or Love2d, they’re pretty low on dependencies (that I can’t just copy from other existing projects). 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.
• sickofparadox 2y ago
  Very detailed texts on every level of networking, from NICs and LANs to BGP routing so I could bring it back up.
• henriquegogo 2y ago
  - Wayback Machine - Common Crawl Basically (almost) the whole internet backup.
• coding123 2y ago
  Just YouTube
• anonzzzies 2y ago
  My github. I like tinkering with software and hardware. I have enough old (70s) to new (last week) hardware, docs and software to get my own village internet going. Ah, and currently I would also preserve some current LLama to tinker with.
• Quinzel 2y ago
  Gwern.net - I don’t read it everyday or anything but there’s some real snippets of literary gold in amongst that guys prolific generation of texts.