this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump (www.404media.co)
submitted 1 day ago by j4p@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world
164 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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."

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[–] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 0 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Sure, solar works. And batteries work - for about 3000 charge-discharge cycles.

[–] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Point is that 3000 cycles is more than enough time to find or make a replacement even if society doesn't rebuild.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

more than enough time to find or make a replacement even if society doesn’t rebuild.

If you're living somewhere with enough easy food, water and shelter that you're not spending all your time just handling that. Making groceries takes a lot of time and effort.

[–] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

The average hunter gatherer only worked for about 3-6 hours a day. They had more free time than we do.