[Hypothetical] The internet is getting shut down for 5 years. You have 100 GB of storage available, you have 24 hours to prepare. What do you download?
[Hypothetical] The internet is getting shut down for 5 years. You have 100 GB of storage available, you have 24 hours to prepare. What do you download?
Lets say you live in a world where the world government has decided people are getting too addicted to the internet and ordered the internet to be shut down for 5 years. The 100 GB of storage is all you have (excluding essential system files for your Operating System). You have 24 hours before the internet is getting shut down. What do you download?
Nothing, because the rest of the world is trying to do the same thing and the internet is now essentially DDoSed into oblivion 24 hours early.
Email/PM everyone I'm in contact with online and ask them for their current phone numbers and addresses, and send them mine. Subscribe to 2-3 local and regional newspapers, and one good national or international one.
Offline contact info for every place I do business with online, and scrape a list of all businesses within 20 miles of home or work. Offline contact info for all the government agencies I or family or friends may need to contact for the next five years. Offline contact info for every local, state, or federal official who supposedly represents me, my family or friends.
A full listing of all my online accounts, with full transaction histories. Copies of all Terms of Service and privacy policies, copies of all warranty, repair and refund policies.
Phone numbers of my favorite restaurants and copies of their current menus. Phone numbers, addresses, visitor information, prices and (where applicable) attraction information for all museums, parks and other attractions in my area.
All my archived email or stored files that's still on a server somewhere. Copies of every single bookmark on every device I have. And copies of every story on AO3.
100 GB
looks at my nas, already stuffed with several TB of content, chuckling
Some panic, while others were ready since the dawn of time. I'll add that extra 100 gigs to my drive collection though...
(it's lots of games, media, and yiff. And yeah, it is enough to hold me over for 5 years. No, you can't see it. :p)
The internet is going down for 5 years? Books and video instructions about farming prolly, I'll probably be unemployed if there's no Internet.
Sorry, but i feel like i have been preparing for this for the last 15 years now. I won't answer the question because I already have 40tb worth of content on my personal NAS. From movies, TV shows, music, and video games, I think I will be good for some time living off of just that. I also have all my docs, and personal pics as well.
Since I live in an area where power goes out a lot and internet can go down once or twice a year (not long but maybe up to 6 hours, worst case) it's already been a great solution that I was able to try out during those events.
With the stipulation that it's 100GB total and not on top of what I already have, then the question is not what I would download, but rather which of my family photos/videos I'm okay with losing.
ROMs
A 100GB of ROMs
Hah, I've been collecting all my needs offline for a while now. Because companies keep turning to subscriptions and other ##. I'm pretty sure my archive of apps is under 100GB
Books and music. The more the merrier
In this thread: dorks using it as an opportunity to brag about their large storage epeens.
But then what happened to my 120 petabyte network attached storage, host to every episode of Inuyasha in multiple releases, languages, and resolutions?! My mother would surely notice having space again in
herour basement!All my movies and TV and wikipedia.
How to self-host/become your own ISP
5 years? Hm, time to get some stuff from the 90s, when the internet was a timed luxury, so plenty of emulators and roms, they won't take much space. Videos are out, some porn will have to be static pics, some as gifs.
Also, gotta have Factorio, Palworld, dwarf fortress
Ultra high-fidelity version of « Sandstorm » and the same copy of the Vern Troyer porn movie with virus that nuked my gf’s computer.
Start running wires and make a intranet with my neighbors. WiFi would be easier, but would the internet police be looking for signals?
Would Netflix go back to mailing physical disks? Would I have to go buy albums? Weird. You could buy of borrow the physical media and add it to your intranet.
I'd probably download a couple TV series and some music. I'd also get software to make sure I can copy and store everything.
Sounds like a good chance to catch up with my backlog of games.
I would check so I can play everything I want offline then just get as much as I can.
Well obviously I'd download 100 GBs of more RAM.
But uh, for serious?
DL everything I'd need to build Debian from bare metal... probably some select material from the IA, basic survival stuff, info on how to set up a solar power system... and all the I2P software and source code i can find.
If the Net goes down, but the physical hardware still exists, cables, radios, wifi cards... build your own Net.
Since it hasn't been mentioned yet:
Project Gutenberg.
It's pretty much all copyright-less (?) books. About 40GB.
I'd probably also torrent a shitton of less-than-legal books. Mostly because they're copyrighted, not because the books themselves are illegal. I would survive the rest of my life on books. Maybe a few GB of music - I'd need some background noise if I were to study.
Some free OS' like Debian and FreeBSD, and their manual. Maybe some magazine about both?
Contact info for all my bills. Everything else is ephemeral so may as well wean off it now.
A couple ROMs, some banger songs and one hyrule warriors legends.
(Had about 700 or so hours I'm the original over a couple of years l).
The internet goomg down is not gonna be as bad as one thinks, at least not for the individual.*Redbox throws hands up in frustration
I would buy a ton of storage devices as secretly as possible and hide them, hoping the government doesn't notice. Then I'd use the drives to make a sneakernet type situation.
I have a 100% remote job a few hundred km away. Even if you made the exception for remote work, my job would basically be pointless because our company operates entirely in the online world.
I also wouldn't be able to Skype or even email my aging family back in the US.
Also, in very rural Japan, online shopping is a huge saver of time and money. I'd also have to watch OTA Japanese tv which mostly sucks.
I was thinking just various learning materials, but I think you can just shoot me instead sometime before the bank repo's my house
Offline wikipedia, original Finnish “Hobitit” as the movie cut, both seasons of the original Polish “Wiedzmin”, latest versions of the usual rust crates, especially everything bevy related, so that I have plenty to do for years even without internet. Probably some sort of copy of stack overflow too, or sections of it, if possible. Offline version for docs.rs, also offline documentation for lua, react, dotnet etc, that I could foresee maybe needing during those 5 years. Reaper DAW with some of my most trusted plugins. No heavyweight synths or vsti though, have to trust people getting more into actual instruments without internet and me being able to record them. Latest Krita, Blender and Obsidian. The most essential plugins, brushes, scripts etc for those too. Starting to close in on the 100gb I guess, so the rest Id dedicate on extremely compressed (but not horrible) versions of my most listened playlists of music; a few of my favorite movies and/or series; and as big of an archive of ebooks (as in fiction) I could muster in a day. If I have space left, my audiobook library, or at least a segment of it, too. I could live without porn, I suppose, as long as the other areas of entertainment and escapism are covered.
The 4K Blu-ray remux of Andor Season 1 is 230 GB. This new government might be shutting down the internet, but I doubt that they're monsters, and so surely wouldn't expect me to re-watch it in any lower quality. Fortunately, I've worked out that the Aldanhi arc and the last 2 episodes are 102 GB, so it should be manageable if some recaps are cut.
Personal medias, Wikipedia, LLM models, good for searching without net innacurate but better than nothing. Instruction how to setup alternative to internet, good chance there is going to be an underground version. Sms contact list of all your friends/families, did not say sms no longer available. Games, eBooks like electrical, health, laws and programming.
I'd download as much 480p TV, movies, etc as possible as quickly as possible.
A bunch of e-books and all the SNES roms I can grab.
Wikipedia, music, cool videos.
I already have 30GB of math textbooks, I guess I'll just download another 70GB of textbooks on various subjects and sell them to students. Y'all gonna return after 5 years to a new Elsevier.
Save just one Blu-ray backup. 😭 My NAS storage will suddenly be unavailable too or no?
Stock up on crypto memes.
For myself? A midi-file library for music (1gb is easily tens of thousands of songs), some audio porn (video takes too much space), a whole bunch of E-Books (tabletop rpg, science, literature etc.), compilers for C, a bunch of core python packages etc.
Meanwhile I'd also head over to my university to warn staff of the impending doom such that they can spread the word to other institutions and start rescuing as much data as possible to non-digital formats.
My ISP recently gave us notice of an extended period of planned downtime so I already gave this some thought.
yt-dlp is a godsend, especially if you reduce the quality. I just set it going on an old playlist for some YouTubers I enjoy. You can find a lot of old comedy on YouTube too which tends to be in playlists.
Other than that, none of classic Doctor Who is HD so doesn't take up too much space. BBC iPlayer works with yt-dlp too with the right settings.
Lines of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" in any format that can fill up 100GB.
Wikipedia is around 100gb
Stellarium Gardening and Plant ID recognition software Mesh Networking Tools Obscure recipe and craft books File Sharing Tools Encryption Software Clonezilla 7-zip A Linux distro
Probably all the top huggingface weights, as they are basically the sweetened condensed internet.
I’ve been meaning to download the Beats In Space Radio mixes from their archive so I’ll just add that