Alexandria

Originally published on August 5, 2026

Image showing Image of a digital collage combining a historical painting of a miner with a large grid of small online images. At the center, a muscular miner works underground with a heavy drill inside a dark tunnel. To the left and along the bottom, hundreds of tiny square images form a dense mosaic, suggesting scraped internet content. A bright beam of light connects the image grid to the miner’s drill. On the right, a block of colorful digital noise contrasts with the detailed painting, reinforcing the link between physical mining and data extraction — Making a doomsday drive ( Zampieri / CC BY 4.0)

One "hobby" I like to check back in with every now and then is making a drive of a bunch of data one may need when the internet isn't an option. Before you call me anything like a doomsday prepper, it's more just something I've done for fun. But who knows, it may come in handy. We really do take the internet for granted. We would be lost without it, especially if it was gone for an extended amount of time. The drive is probably more likely to be helpful in the short term, like in a natural disaster, rather than in an actual apocalypse scenario where powering your devices becomes an issue. Despite all that, I still refer to it as a doomsday drive for shorthand.

If you have a spare drive lying around, it could be a fun project to load it up with stuff you may need in an "apocalypse". Here are some ideas of things I've downloaded. The sky, and maybe your mental health and time, is the limit with what you could do. r/DataHoarder is a good resource for this.

Kiwix

Kiwix is a service that allows you to download offline versions of many critical and crucial online resources like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, iFixit, MedlinePlus, Khan Academy, the Minecraft Wiki, and much more from their library then access them using their readers. You can download all of Wikipedia for just over 100 gigabytes. Make sure to download the reader software onto the drive as well so you can use the databases on whatever device you need to. The .zim files I downloaded from their library were FOSS Cooking, Gutenberg, iFixit, Military Medicine, Medline Plus, the Minecraft Wiki, Public Domain Recipes, Wikibooks, Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, ready.gov, and cdc.gov.

Software

There's lots of software you might want to throw on there. Some ideas are GeoGebra, LibreOffice, GIMP, Python, VSCodium, Proton VPN, Briar, 7-Zip, and/or not limited to WinRAR.

Manuals

Since we're talking about survival scenarios, you might as well throw some survival manuals on there. The ones I downloaded were the FM 21-76 US Army Survival Manual, the American Red Cross First Aid, CPR, and AED Instructor's and Participant's Manuals, Where There Is No Doctor, and Where There Is No Dentist.

Maps

The easiest way to download maps for offline use is actually with OsmAnd, an Android app. I downloaded a low quality version of the world map, that has things like major roads and cities, along with the map of the entire US, for around 17 gigabytes. Otherwise, you can download the OpenStreetMap and then view it with Maperitive. This one isn't even just for an "apocalypse" - that would be useful for when you're simply left without signal.

Media

I haven't bothered with downloading movies, shows, or music using r/Piracy, simply because I don't know where to start or end. You would need to go through various sites and download either the things you know you want or things you deem as important enough to save. With games, I can set a clear bound of "all the games on this console" or something, but that doesn't make as much sense with movies, shows, and music. Not to say you shouldn't if you want to. It's your problem.

You can download games and their emulators at r/Roms. You can download the Musen emulator and all (yes, all) the games for the consoles it supports (NES, SNES, GB, GBC, GBA, PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16, SMS, GG) for just 5ish gigabytes. If you want to add on more recent games that probably hold up better, I got the English Nintendo 64 games for about 9 gigabytes and the GameCube games for 36. I also made a separate drive with every first party Nintendo game, from the NES to the Switch 1, in 1 terabyte.

Other Ideas

When looking for things to download onto a portable drive, I've hit multiple "dead ends" of things I would've liked to save but was unable to. AI chatbots (I tried through Ollama, GPT4ALL, LM Studio, and PocketPal), translation software (through DeepL), and WikiHow (they banned web scraping) were all examples of this. If you're smart and determined enough, maybe you could figure them out.

Maybe you want to go out of your way to download specific media that you think you be crucial. Religious texts (the Bible(s), the Qur'an, etc), political texts (the Communist Manifesto), controversial texts (Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid's Tale), and important texts (Plato's Republic). Especially if you're going the more historical route, the Internet Archive likely has what you're looking for.