If the internet went away indefinitely, what things would you wish you had downloaded before it happened?
For me it would be a full copy of wikipedia, an offline copy of some maps of where I live, some linux ISO's, and a lot of entertainment media.
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If you'd download the whole wikipedia be sure to download the whole commets section for each article to have a perspective on discussions on conflicting reasons for edits. Also include all the wiki media materials for all of the public domain literature, project gutenberg, entire archive.org, a good offline OS to be able to consume all of the information and you're golden
How much would it cost to store like 100 petabytes for (conservatively) 40 years?
You mean electricity bills for powering the storage? I guess buying 100pb worth of storage disks would be pretty expensive enough but since it's an archive there is no need to keep it powered 24/7, just turn them on only when you need to. It's just a hypothetical situation anyway, it's a thing I wish to have access to; only an experienced sysadmin can actually maintain such great archive or its copy/backup
A lot
Let's assume you have all hard drives and in a setup with absolutely zero redundancy in case a drive fails.
We're using the Seagate Exos X24 (24TB) drive which is roughly $700 each brand new.
You'll need 4167 of them to store 100PB. Which puts you at $2,916,900 just for the drives.
Let's assume you already have the enclosures, racks, and servers for a small datacenter ready to go.
A drive can use 4-9w of power when spinning so assuming all drives are active (to ensure quick data access and data repair) that'll be roughly 27086w for all the drives at 6.5w per drive. Every month (30 days), that is 19502kWh of electricity used. 40 years is roughly 349,680 hours so that comes out to around 9,471,433kWh used.
Assuming you get some damn good electricity rates at $0.12USD per kWh, it'll cost $1,136,572 to run just the drives.
So in total, assuming you already have a datacenter with the capacity to install all the drives that runs on absolutely zero power, you'll spend roughly $4,053,472 over the course of 40 years.
There is a much cheaper way that doesn't use hard drives. It uses magnetic tapes, LTO-9 tapes specifically.
Each LTO-9 tape cassette can hold up to 45TB of data (compression is used to store it on the raw 18TB).
An LTO-9 tape drive can cost $10,000. Assuming you get the full 45TB per tape, you'll need 2223 LTO-9 tape cassettes to store 100PB. Assuming you buy in bulk, you can get each tape cassette for $150 which puts you at $333,450 for the tapes.
Since the tapes don't use power when not in use, this concludes the total cost. None of this accounts for storing all 2223 tapes or maintenance to ensure data is still intact on them but this comes out to $343,450 in total to store 100PB using magnetic tapes. While the cost is much cheaper, it's much harder to access the data as it's not immediately available since you have to fish out the drive you need and plop it into the tape drive then wait for it to read.
A full copy of Stack Overflow. Otherwise, we would not know how to get the Internet working again.
Somethings are better when done from scratch.
not sure what you’re refering to:)
http plz fix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer
For what
The arch linux wiki, where you will be instructed to install various dependencies from the AUR
Why doesn't the OS install those for you
Depends on how up-to-date your install image is. If you downloaded the ISO 6 months ago, chances are, the build you downloaded is out of date (doubly so if it's Arch). Most installers have an online option that will download the updates and install the newest version, but if you don't have access to the internet, then all you have is the data included in the ISO that you got 6 months ago.
does that apply to the rest of Linux? I saw it in Kiwix but haven't delved into it
I did grab the ifixit zim though. pretty cool at only ~7gb
e621 dump
based
Not one, but two references to e621 in this thread. And neither are from users on the furry instances. Much to think about.
okay, you caught me, my .world profile was supposed to be my non-furry lemmy account.
Can't believe I'm the first to say this, but... porn.
archive.org, which contains wikipedia too. Checkmate!
What's the file size on that?
The file size doesnt matter
Imagine how much money you could make selling access to specific websites
You should start downloading it right now in case the internet goes down
I've got a couple of 10TB HDDs. Is that enough?
The amount of data required for that would be immense. From what I’ve been able to find it’s over 200 petabytes.
Pff, rookie numbers. I have a 3k zettabytes data center at home
Would you like a roommate?
in my basement, sure
All the Debian ISO images and all of the documentation on everything.
This way. I should have all the stable software I could wish for and the instructions on how to use them.
don't forget the source code!
I’ve made sure I’m good to go, as I always thought the day might come that I can’t afford internet anyway.
I have my entire gog and itch library downloaded (if I have any steam games not on gog, I’ve pirated them if I can find it). I have my nas full of movies and tv. I listen to all my favourite music on records. Every couple of years I go through and update my rom library to make sure I have the most to to date best known roms.
Even as much as possible I keep latest version of the Linux iso I might want, and if there is an appimage of my most used programs, it’s there too.
I’m pretty much ready for my life to become leaner when it comes to internet.
I wanna be your friend lol
Assuming the web would go completely bust, I'd go back to a much simpler life.
All the images I have bookmarked on multiple devices from e621, any game I've been even possibly hesitating on pirating, all my Steam games (I don't trust Inwouldnhe able to get in and install them if I could even get into my account to begin with at that point), and downloading every single song I have saved on yt and Newpipe because I'd never see them again.
A whole slew of things.
i already download all my favs from e6 and FA lul
Man I have never thought about it because of feeling so at ease with the digital video game stores and just downloading what I want whenever I want without keeping a physical library that would take up space. Same with books.
If the internet died tomorrow, I would have the stuff I'm playing or reading or watching downloaded but I would be out of luck for anything else until it came back. Maybe it's time to start a backup, get a big HDD or something
Wikipedia would be the most valuable thing if I had to pick one, I guess.
An maybe the "your jimmies are eternal video" in case I need to unrustle my jimmie ever again.
I do have a copy of wikipedia and I should be good on entertainment media. I guess I should expand the emergency porn stash.
Just out of curiosity, how much space/effort was that to set up? (Yes, I know I can probably google up like a bajillion resources on this exact thing, but I'm a weirdo and am attempting to bring the (non-toxic/shitty) social back to social media)
I've been considering setting myself up a little NAS server since I finally dumped Spotify and am considering doing the same with video streaming too (besides Tubi, anyway), but having one just for mp3/light video streaming seems like a bit of a waste and having local repos of useful sites might be a fun side project to help justify it to myself lol
I went with a Synology NAS (I know, the foss crowd will probably crucify me) which really keeps the setup effort to a minimum. You put in the HDDs, setup your pool/volume, install Plex (or jellyfin), upload your media and you're basically good to go.
For the Wikipedia part, it's surprisingly simple. I just used Kiwix and grabbed a copy, it's only about 100gb or so. You can also use it to get offline copies of other stuff, like Project Gutenberg.
I'm using emby for music, audiobooks, tv, and movies. You can also do picture backup/sync if you want. I am running it in a docker on my unraid server.
I guess a lot of music and movies from a pirate site. I'd spend more time at the library listening to my music.
Arch wiki with arch man docs.
Today I learned I'm unintentionally preparing for the Internet apocalypse.
Honestly I'd probably just give up on technology entirely. Become a hermit carpenter or something
The Time Cube so I could rebuild society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
https://web.archive.org/web/19981212033445/http://www.timecube.com/
Even better version: https://web.archive.org/web/20120224094852/http://www.timecube.com/
What the hell
Definitely entertainment, but beyond that, Networking classes so that I can hack together a intranet for my household and the neighbourhood
Having the whole wikipedia would get you a damn good start to getting back to civilization.
Only as good as you know about the topic, try doing a http server from just a Wikipedia page
Not too hard with a single server as your node and everyone being wired into it. Obviously you would have to code every website and have all required dependencies there already.
Latest llama version and instructions for setting it up
Those naked pictures of your mom
Oh please, you can find those in the yellow pages
Dick Valentine, is that you?
Honestly, I think I'm mostly set already (as I often go backpacking and there's no internet there). I have offline maps for the country I'm in and neighboring regions downloaded in OsmAnd and mapy.cz (two sources just in case), Wikipedia in Kiwix, and my custom NixOS setup as a bootable ISO on a flashdrive. I'll probably miss being able to watch science/maths edutainment on YouTube, but it's not something I'd download.
More pirated TV
I could honestly just re-watch most of my shows until the end of time.
I will literally never get tired of Bee and Puppycat.
This is basically my answer. I would wish my NAS was more full. I already have a pretty (imo) decent homelab with a lot of shit on it but in a “post internet” situation it would get old after a few months or maybe years depending on how fast I watched/read/listened
So tv/movies/music/books/comics and manga. Just all the media
Probably forums I use to solve problems (stackoverflow and all the stack exchange ones), offline games, guides (for programming, sysadmin, building tables, cooking, travel and repair ones…), documentation for every software and tool I use or might use. Wikipedia is also a must, music too. I have a media server for my music but keeping it up to date with every release is hard work that I haven’t started (yet).
BBS software. Nerds always find a way. I guess if I have to be a sysop now…
Grab the whole world, not just where you live, it's not too much space
All of seriouseats.com
A decent chunk of that is in The Food Lab cookbook.
annas-archive.org, arxiv.org, and maybe internet archive too if possible
All the extension office university data on plants, agriculture, etc. It’s invaluable info for anyone who grows their own food and deals with bees in relation to that food growth.
Is there an archive of this kind of data anywhere? I'd love to store this. I've already got a few wikis, including Wikipedia itself, but I'd love more
It’s individual universities.
Lots of code repos. Especially repos for programming languages, compilers, and Git.
just this
I'm adding https://www.survivorlibrary.com/ to the list
Netflix.
Arcane Season 1 and 2.
A distilled DeepSeek R1 model.
Ableton Live
https://youtu.be/Ay1kP6SyqP4
Bananaphone
Opera videos.
All Jetbrains products
I already did.
Nothing.
If the Internet went away, we'd have a little time before batteries were not viable even if replaceable, as distributing those batteries would get problematic.
We would have had no time to withdraw cash as cash, an important thing since banks will fall over at least enough to trigger an economic collapse.
No, we're all gonna need to learn how to fight, and live without hospitals and drugs and probably electricity.
We have bigger problems than ensuring we can look up the capital of Rwanda on this cached Wikipedia while we listen to The Cure.
internet =/= electricity.
True but he's got a point. If the internet suddenly went away, there are likely bigger problems to deal with.
Similar to "if the government can't cash your check, we're all fucked"
Good thing portable solar panels & lead-acid batteries exist that can easily power a couple of laptops even if their internal batteries are cooked. Solar panels last for a very long time if cared for, and lead-acid batteries can be (somewhat) useful almost indefinitely if you replace the electrolyte.
So it would be really handy to have instructions for maintaining or even building weaponry, medical/medicinal literature to find useful herbs or other remedies, and engineering literature/textbooks/software to help us rebuild the electrical grid and then the Internet.
What makes you think I didn't already download everything I want?
Nothing, I never said any such thing. In your case your answer to my question would be "I would not have to wish, because I already downloaded everything I want". This makes you wise.
That's a much classier way of calling someone a digital hoarder :)
Haha, I have an ok amount of data tucked away on disks as well, but I have a huge appreciation for people who do collect data as a hobby. In the contemporary, I fully believe that having people who take it upon themselves to do this is more important than ever, even thought it is often a thankless thing to do.
So in this case, I would throw a thank you your way for doing that!