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
This is stupid.
Fear = Profit!
Would you like to know more?Yeah but if society collapses or there’s some long power outage (sup Texas) then this thing could be worth its weight in gold. More than its weight in gold.
Assuming you have a generator.
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.
That is why it is a backup. The others will still be used. There is one drive I want to get rid of, and it is because it has been malfunctioning for a long, long time.
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.
Good idea for normal people that are not really knowing how and what to put on such a device
What kind of storage do they use? Because SSDs left unpowered will lose data.
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.
Yup.
SSDs are not good for long term storage. “Old” disk drives are still king for long term.
512GB for the bargain price of $189?? Why are we shilling what we can download via torrent for free?
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.
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
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.
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’ ?
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.
True, but trust me, AI in 5 years will be so advanced, that a 2B model will make a joke of deepseek
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.
Now that sounds like a winner to me. I will be on the lookout
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.
While I agree, where do you start if you have zero clue on what exactly you’re trying to accomplish? An LLM is fine for quick search and summary, then read through the applicable data.
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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 such, 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.
*Edit suck - such
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.
Wouldn’t something like this be potentially quite useful if you live in an area that could easily see a natural disaster that results in weeks without a connection to the outside world? Sure you could build a raspberry pi to do it yourself but not everyone is capable of doing that and its also a low power consumption device which is useful to keep your backup power going longer, ideally through a battery as a generator normally doesn’t do very low wattage efficiently. Solar is variable and lower power demands means you can go smaller, or helps keep it more reliable.
I find prepper stuff has a fine line between reasonable preparation for something that may well happen and then you get into the crazies that think the world is ending and they are actually going to achieve anything in such a situation beyond dying alone.
As I live in the UK the most likely disaster is a couple cm of snow which will break most infrastructure, shops will run out of things like milk and bread for days. This happened a few years ago, I had to resort to making tortillas instead for my lunch.
