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.”
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
https://www.prepperdisk.com/pages/how-does-it-work
Would be nice if they’d offer downloads for the disk image. Or at least sell the disk image since I don’t need yet another Pi lol.
Go get it directly from Kiwix
Well…that sent me down a rabbit hole. Thanks!
Yeah Kiwix is great for this, I just put together what this company is essentially selling for free by myself a few months ago. In fact I would be surprised if this company wasn’t using Kiwix as most of the resources they listed are on it already.
Kiwix is awesome. Many many years ago we made a sharepx from all of Gutenbergs library and creative commons works. We also added public maps.
Less end of the world, more entertainment and helping out the community.
There are also pirate boxes that do the same with not so free resources. And they work offline for hundreds of devices.
Has room for a porn folder too right?
Seems like an amateur apocalyptic preparation oversight that it wasn’t included already.
I know a guy who can hook you up
Just check under homework.
My documents/faxes/saved faxes/Trash/receipts/
You forgot “taxes.”
Not sure if this is allowed, but I had to see if this was true, and also if it was expensive- it isn’t!
(I do not work for, or with anything involved in this)
That’s a shockingly bad price, considering the storage. You could put this together yourself for less than half that price. Maybe even a quarter of the price, if you grab used stuff from ebay.
That may be true; but not everyone knows how to.
I just purchased 18 TB of surplus disks for 200 CAD, the price there doesn’t seem that good to me.
I feel like the $190 they want for the Pi 4/microSD version would’ve been a reasonable price for the Pi 5/NVME version.
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.
Ooh. As a hobbyist “mostly for funzies” prepper I was mildly interested. But then I clicked around their site a bit and I found preorders for a version of the prepper disk with an LLM chatbot “companion.”. Assuming the LLM is using RAG on the library of source documents and isn’t just relying on its training, that’s really neat. I know people will exclaim “hallucination!”, but in a situation where you literally have no idea what to do, no way to get help, and the alternative is lying down and dying, I could see this being really handy. Often the hardest part of having a giant archive of information is how to find what you need out of it and interpret what it’s telling you.
I’d rather use an “open” version of this, though. Prepper Disk’s website sounds like they’re trying to keep their data at least partially locked down, and while I can understand that they want to recoup the cost of the effort they put into setting this up it kind of goes against the grain of prepping to rely on something that you can’t repair or modify yourself.
AI opponents will spend their last hours manually slogging through 250GB of content rather than let a hallucination potentially misguide them.
I’m reminded of that AI-written book that misidentified poisonous mushrooms.
I’m reminded that AI is helping me restore an old motorbike I got for practically free, and the only fight we had was looking for the oil filter on the wrong side of the bike
Yeah, you have to take it for what it’s worth, and it’s worth a lot. Most of what it says is pretty close, and when close is good enough, go for it. When AI is telling you how to secure your brake hydraulic connectors and it doesn’t seem quite right - time for a 2nd opinion.
For sure, AIs/llms can be dangerous if you don’t also apply critical thinking, but that’s been true of the internet forever, and even before. The Anarchist cookbook has recipes that will, at best, waste a bunch of soap and gasoline or have you scraping banana peels with a razorblade, or at worst, have you making chlorine gas in your basement. 4chan had a popular recipe for “peanut butter cookies” that would result in an oven fire, and instructions to drill a hole in your iPhone to use the headphone jack.
It’s much more important to protect and promote critical thinking skills than it is to try to shield everybody from misinformation and hallucinations.
more important to protect and promote critical thinking skills
My father had a 50 year career in education, he spent it trying to promote critical thinking - he recently retired and feels that the system has made negative progress through all 50 years of his career in terms of improving critical thinking skills through the educational system.
Right. So it told you objectively wrong information while the correct answer is freely available from technical documents that it ought to know how to read.
So imagine if that was something actually life threatening.
I’m reminded of the people who misidentify poisonous mushrooms each year and die from it.
AI is worthless if you are unable to tell hallucination from fact.
But just like NP hard problems, verifying a given solution is much easier than coming up with one yourself.
You’ll never win against AI haters. Nothing is perfectly accurate and even if LLMs are less accurate than average it does not diminish the use case potential.
If someone’s eats a dradly mushroom based on 1 research source then really thats just natural selection at play lol
Yeah, but won’t you need enough electricity to power a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for this to work?
A single rooftop solar panel can do that, and charge a battery for a little after dark use while you’re at it.
A true prepper will get an eInk monitor and resist the urge to scroll until they read all the way to the bottom of the page, but even a normal monitor uses a small fraction of a solar panel. Keyboard? Near zero. Mouse? Near zero x10 but still near zero when compared with 200W. RasPi? less than a normal monitor.
That doesn’t take much power, a solar panel or two should be more than sufficient, or you can rig something up w/ a defunct ebike (just run the motor backwards to generate electricity).
If the monitor draws even 20W, you’re gonna be tired of that eBike generator solution really quick.
You’d be charging a battery, not running directly off the bike. Still, solar panels are extremely cheap these days. I picked up a 120 watt panel for 50 bucks recently, it could keep something like this running for hours each day.
So, I believe a tolerable generator load for most people to pedal is around 10W… battery charge / discharge is maybe 80% efficient, so you’re netting 8W into your storage. Pedal relatively hard for an hour and you might get 20 minutes use of your IPS LCD screen.
Solar panels are indeed the way to go.
I mention ebikes because if we’re in an apocalypse situation, your solar panels may not be very efficient. There are a ton of electric motors out there, so generating power is totally feasible in a prepper situation even if the sky is torched Matrix style, just attach any electric motor to a bicycle and you’re good to go (or water or wind turbine, etc).
The average laptop is 65W. So the 40 amp solar battery station I built with a 100w panel could run a laptop 7 hours a day without any issues at all. Plenty of time to get actionable information out of it.
Sure, solar works. And batteries work - for about 3000 charge-discharge cycles.
That’s… a lot of cycles. That’s almost a decade. Plenty of time to build an electric generator from scratch by traveling on foot to a copper mine and smelting the wire yourself. Unless you manage to pull an alternator from a car that can’t find gasoline and save yourself the trip. From that you could make a gravity battery or any number of other options.
Point being, after 3000 cycles, it’s toast and there’s no fresh bread available.
Yes, you could construct something, but I think you’d be pretty amazed at how maintenance intensive a 1kWh gravity battery is.
Point is that 3000 cycles is more than enough time to find or make a replacement even if society doesn’t rebuild.
It sounds like you can connect with your phone, which reduces the energy footprint quite a bit.
I was hoping it would be one of those drives built to last hundreds of years. Oh well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2 weeks of food
Jars of peanut butter. Stuff is so calorie dense, ready to eat, protein, sturdy plastic containers for shoving into backpacks. A couple jars will do for only a few weeks.
Downside is that it doesn’t last quite as long as dried beans and rice. But beans and rice take up alot of space and I don’t eat enough to rotate out years supply worth in time.
Plenty of humans to eat as well. Don’t discount what the wild animals around you can provide.
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.
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 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.
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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
My doomsday kit is just a bottle of SoCo and a camping chair.
I love this idea. I couldn’t help but think of the innernette though.
