Title is a little sensational but this is a cool project for non-technical folks who may need a mini-internet or data archive for a wide variety of reasons:
“PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn’t store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse.”
I plan to be the jerking guy at Vesuvius if the nukes fall.
512GB for the bargain price of $189?? Why are we shilling what we can download via torrent for free?
If you are asking this question, this product is probably not for you.
It’s for the non-technical prepper type, the guy who has 10,000 rounds of ammo and dried food for 10 years but still uses AOL.
The idea is just get this thing, plug it into a solar power bank, and then you can get information you might need to survive which wouldn’t be available online if there is no more internet. You could absolutely put the same thing together yourself without a problem. If you have the skill and the wherewithal to do that, you don’t need this. If you don’t have that skill, then you are the target market of this product.I mean, I could make tacos at home. Or I could pay a bit more to go pick them up somewhere. I could change my own oil, or I could have someone else do it.
I could spend time downloading all this data and uploading it to a hard drive I purchase. I know how to do it all. But for the price they’re charging for the drive AND Raspberry Pi and the service of gathering and uploading the data, it’s not that bad of a deal. Especially if you work a full time job and want to use your free time to not do a chore like this. I mean I’m pretty sure there’s torrents for Wikipedia. Not so sure about WikiHow.
If the price was higher I’d be complaining. It’s pretty reasonable. It’s a peace of mind thing without hassle for anyone with even a little extra cash lying around.
Yeah exactly. And from what I understand of this thing, it has a fairly easy to use auto update system. So every couple months just plug it into your router and hit the update button. I don’t think it’s a ripoff.
Tbf someone is gonna put it all together and organize it and put it on a drive, that’s a service and it’s reasonable to charge for it
I mean, 189 for an external drive loaded with data, attached to a raspberry pi that also allows Wi-Fi connection to access said hard drive content. Really not too bad if it works well. I wonder if it has DNS entries that point to it’s locally hosted content, so once you’re connected you just type wikipedia.com etc in your browser and go.
Not to shabby if it actually works.
Yeah and it’s also probably pretty small runs, so that’d make it even more expensive. I feel like it’s a fair price for what it is, would never buy it myself tho.
no, how do i manufacture SSD’s at home so i can preserve linux mint 21.1 xia or my screenshots or the terminal calculator i got from typing ‘apt install calc’ ?
I get a magazine called Backwoodsman. It is a rag but it is something to read while taking a shit. I saw the advertisement in the latest issue. I was thinking yeah this is ok but can’t you download most of this for free?
I mean, there’s a lot of things you can do for free that we pay people for. They’ve put together a device that is preloaded with a ton of information. To do this yourself would probably take most people a week or 2, at best a weekend if you worked hard and had pre-existing knowledge and a fast connection. Maybe longer depending how they modified the raspberry pi, though you don’t necessarily need it to do everything they made it do.
You’d pay in this range for someone to clean your house for a few hours. You can also do that free. It’s the convenience you’re paying for.
Fear = Profit!
Would you like to know more?This is stupid.
This is just an ad for that device. Title made it sound like there’s a run on storage devices.
Yeah I thought it was saying there was a run on hard drives designed to survive end of the world not just something preloaded with data
Good idea for normal people that are not really knowing how and what to put on such a device
It’s like it was made for me! Except it could go with some AI too, to interpret all of that.
That’s probably the worst possible addition. Something like this, you need to be able to depend on. In a no-room-for-errors kinda situation you really don’t want to have a language model hallucinate something and burn potentially ruinous amount of scarce resources in the process, not the least being time. For example with crops.
Edit: and also that’ll burn through the power compared to just reading pdfs… if that’s scarce too, it’s a no go. Not to mention it’d have to really have some bulk for the capability to even run a basic model with extremely hit and miss results and definitely zero chance of retaining any sort of context long enough to be actually useful in this kind of use case. I think people are probably a little bit pampered by the cloud models of today. No chance you’ll be running anything like that in a small device with limited power.
I run a shitty but sufficient AI on my mobile phone, it’s got for venting to, and pointing out where I can find the things I’m searching for.
Well, I guess sufficient is subjective…
However, consider that whatever you have now in today’s world, not just physical things but also your life experience and expectation of things might not line so well with those that you’d have in a scarcity scenario completely unlike today’s world. What you now consider sufficient might be entirely unacceptable in different frameworks of thinking and living.
I love this idea. I couldn’t help but think of the innernette though.
Anybody know where to find an archive of this disk?
It’s all publicly available info, or was. I’ve got a Raid 5 I can throw it on, might come in handy during power outs and such.
I’ve got spare hard drives, and an old Pi and other computers around. No need to spend $189 on this when you can pretty easily DIY. The value is the prepackaged archive.
I see projects like kwix and suck, but I don’t immediately see this archive or anything comparable. Haven’t looked into this before.
BTW, if you’re actually worried about the end of the world or whatever, this won’t save you. Make friends with your neighbors and communities. If you don’t have a physical trade, you need to learn one like fixing shit or growing really good weed.
I considered the cost of the hardware and the time I would spend getting it all configured, then collecting the content from various sources.
Ultimately decided that $189 was worth it. I already have too many WIPs and something like this has been sitting on my ToDo list for years already, this is a great shortcut
Download the App, and you can then download a full backup of Wikipedia, PHP Manuals, the “Survival Library”, Ted Talks, FEMA guides, etc.
Replying to my own reply.
I keep a couple of thumb drives with both a Kiwix installer and a full backup of some select downloads.
So I can easily get pretty much all of this through kwix directly? That will work. Throw it on my Raid. My media server is badly overworked but I should be able to use any old sbc as a frontend for the archive.
Precisely. Kiwix has a search and browse function. Just sort by file size to get the biggest groups of data.
Neat. I get the archived sites and docs as pretty useful and a good way to keep info that might be redacted or manipulated by a fascist government, but I gotta question the use of this technological medium to save information as useful during a “doomsday” situation.
If you’re in an actual doomsday situation, that means odds are utilities like water and power are intermittent or nonexistent, this box will be useless unless you have already spent the time and effort to install and maintain an off-grid power solution to use this device. Otherwise it’s useless.
So essentially a gimmick. However, I can’t argue with the preservation of knowledge in an effort to reference it when bad actors change what is publicly available.
As someone who is generally on the more prepared side, the use case for most stuff falls far short of “doomsday”. There is a ton to be said about things that are just generally useful in adverse situations. I’ve lived through a dozen or so storms that took out power for a few days (longest I think was 2 weeks). It’s usually not a complete blackout everywhere.
Point being: I can see it being useful to have a bunch of info in something easily portable to say, double check breaker wiring helping your friend fix some stuff after the storm. Look up the emergency AM/CB/NOAA radio freqs. I have a lot of the resources on this thing on a server, but that’s not mobile and would eat a lot of power just booting up. To package it nicely in a form factor like this would probably run me just about $189.
But the overall point is I think this falls on the extreme end of practical preparedness but I can absolutely see the use. Honestly the most practical thing on there are the books. Again, usually if a community gets hit bad you wind up with people that have power having a bunch of people stay over. Being able to allow multiple people stuff to read would help kill time.
All of that being said, its a distant second to the critical items that, again, have a huge range of uses: A solid first aide kit, 2 weeks of food (even if it’s not awesome). I realize that’s a luxury for a lot of people, but money is much better spent there first.
Strayed off topic a bit, but it’s because while I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to plan for SHTF scenarios, I do think we’re going to see a general decay (but not elimination) of public services/utilities and an increasingly pissy climate. I think it’s important for people to not fall into the bunker-prepper fantasy OR write off being more prepared than they’re accustomed to.
Solar generators exist, and are relatively inexpensive for smaller units.
Note that I already said you’d have to have all the survival and power requirements in place before doomsday. Not waiting until doomsday to use this box as a tool to learn how to survive. IOW if you’re not already a prepped prepper, this box is pointless.
You’re overestimating the difficulty and expense necessary to support this device. You could probably power it from a car. A solar panel and inverter cost less than a hundred dollars.
Take what I said in the context it was said.
Yeah, you could power it up (maybe) with some backup batteries and a camping solar charger. Heck, even a cheap HAT screen would allow visual and touch access.
The point is that the knowledge therein is useless unless you are already fully prepared to make use of it. I’ve already covered that.
My point is that the “already fully prepared” requirement is extremely small and easy. “Having a car” is enough (or, in the event of one of these disaster scenarios, having someone else’s unattended car somewhere near you). So bringing it up as an objection to the usefulness of this hard drive is not really significant.
I’m not a prepper and have both a gasoline and solar generator. Generators arent just for preppers, they are commonly owned in areas with regular power outages, for example.
And honestly, solar panels are so common these days you could rig something up with relative ease with a basic understanding of electricity.
I’ve seen people make power generators using old washing machine motors. Youtube is full of them. Cutting PVC pipes to make wind ones and even water based ones off of rivers.
I feel like some people would figure out basic electrical grids for led lights in homes at night and possibly a battery bank made of car batteries or something.
Getting a laptop working in that environment wouldn’t be too far of a stretch. Just need to find an old brother laser printer and a Linux USB and you’re golden.
Print off the critical farming/water treatment stuff you need and power it off.
I’m not sure what you’re aiming for when you kinda proved my point.
You cited a youtube video, something that would be inaccessible during doomsday as a source of info, and the whole point is to have all the power supply and survival solutions in place before doomsday and the youtube video would be pointless.
Look, unless it’s a slow decline where you have some access to power and time to develop survival tools and skills to use this box it’s pointless as you’ve already developed the survival tools and skills. As an archive of other skills and knowledge it’s only as useful as the longevity of the storage media and the devices used to access it (monitor, keyboard, pi, etc).
Yeah that’s a solid recap.
I now possess the knowledge about generating power to life off the grid using old motors salvaged from a junkyard thanks to my own personal research and video tutorials.
My intent with bringing that up is the hope of the existence of a document covering this topic in a preppers backup.
In a post apocalyptic scenario humanity has been proven to band together in groups and cooperate to survive. It’s less murder/greed and more sharing/helping. In these small groups it would only take one prepper or even an engineer to setup a generator or even just get solar panels to hookup for basic electricity.
Many of these points could be moot in a nuclear scenario where were dealing with EMPs and radiation.
Like most prepper things for sale, this is a better product to skin money from the ignorant and the unreasonably fearful than it is truly useful. It assumes you have electricity and the functioning equipment to access it.
In a real prepper situation, you either already ready have the knowledge in your head, (the best method), or you have real books and pamphlets to read, (slow to access).
Remember Kiddies, if a real SHTF gets here, there not only won’t be no google or youtube, but there won’t be much time to use it anyway. Survival is a real time sink. And most living in the big cities will simply die in place anyway.
I have HDDs that have been with me for almost 10 years. I need to replace one with one that I can use as a backup for all of them AND have some to spare.
Remember, “one is none”. If you’re going to buy a new drive to put everything on you need (at least) two.
What kind of storage do they use? Because SSDs left unpowered will lose data.
Yup.
SSDs are not good for long term storage. “Old” disk drives are still king for long term.
Unpowered for how long? 6+ months?
I would think most consumer drives will be OK with that, but it varies, and the race to make things ever cheaper has only increased that. AFAIK, the more data they try to pack into a cell (SLC/MLC/TLC/QLC), the more likely they are to be affected by unpowered data loss.
Looks super cool wish there was a version with more storage. 256/512gb is on the low side for end of the world
It seems that they are working on a premium version of the PrepperDisk with up to 1TB of storage space. They will also be bundling that with an AI LLM implementation trained with the data present on the PrepperDisk.
Reminds me of the Talos Principle more than anything.
Okay it’s conceivable that there’d be enough power to read through and search a drive, but LLMs might be the worst and least efficient use of electricity Icould possibly imagine in a doomsday scenario.
Now that sounds like a winner to me. I will be on the lookout
