[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?
Download factorio and dwarf fortress
Lots of tools and games that are open ended and not contrived as well as the obligatory Wikipedia download.
Godot, Blender, Gimp, latest tutorial series for all three, Wikipedia (which I already have), music, fill the rest with art assets.
If I can't download games I will simply make them.
Aside from the fact that playing something youve created is an entirely different experience to discovering something unexpected that someone else has created, you would need space to store your created games still.
I mean, just because the Internet is down doesn't mean you can't go buy another hard drive in a brick and mortar store later.
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)
- general info
- A large LLM with many parameters
- specific info
- Wikipedia, WikiHow, TVTropes, various survival Guides, HAM radio operation
qwen2.5, mistral large, llama3.1/3.2, ...
Which one would you pick?
- general info
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.
- personnal files that are stored in the Cloud
- Wikipedia
- Linux and Raspberry ISO, and some libs/tools packages, sources and docs
- sandbox games and rogue likes
- wiki for these games
- as much porn as I can download with the remaining storage available
Unless it's a fascist government, I don't care about ebooks, mp3, movies or TV show. I'll use books, vinyls and DVD.
Well, I'd be down like 60TB, so getting to keep 100GB of that isn't much different than losing it all, might as well not bother with it and just wait out the 5 years and start over.
It's a lot of books
I do paper books.
A collection of older and therefore smaller games. A bunch of music in mp3 (or maybe something like AAC or OPUS). A bunch of ebooks. A handful of my favorite TV shows and/or movies heavily recompressed, like maybe 720p.
Don't rule out midi or mod music file formats
Wikipedia
I think the full dump of wikipedia complete with multimedia is like 5 GB. the text-only version is something like 100MB.
22 gb without media
I have already more than 100GB, why would I rip out my drives when the internet is going down?
Oh you don't have to rip them out. The benevolent world government will do that for you. Do not resist.
I have almost a TB of of private photos, they are not related to the internet.
I take about a hundred GB of photos every year.
100GB of free space is an insult.
First thing that came to my mind was total source repository of Debian Sid, but that's apparently 500GB uncompressed[0]. Probably would fit into 100GB with compression though. Latest stable is only 380GB, that might make more sense.
50 classic albums in ~128Kbps.
100-200 books in epub.
If there are some compact database of most common and best recipes, that.
Some kind of a guide for doing everyday things, although a good LLM might cover that.
1/10th of a Call of Duty game.
Just find 9 more people and then y'all can meet up and play the game.
I still have to work right?
This reminds me, there were a lot of sd shows that were around 60megs a pop.
That’s a lot of shows. Just sayin
Well you are only getting one chance of downloading stuff for the next 5 years, so you might wanna call out from work. Or you know, just set it to download automatically and go to work, and hope your computer doesn't crash or windows try to update itself.
Is file compression allowed?
E.g: 100 GB compressed, or uncompressed?
you have 100GB available. if you pack it full, you cannot unpack
What about dynamic in (system) memory decompression though?
Allowed. It would be more complicated to define what “compressed not allowed” means. A png file uses compression. Most videogames include compressed assets. Uncompressed video is basically unheard of.
100GB?? I'd be more worried about WTF will happen to the rest of my 100TB of storage
Confiscated by order of the benevolent United Nations world government.
You are being liberated from the Internet Opium, do not resist.
Math, science, chemistry, carpentry, gardening, and mechanical/engineering texts.
And repair manuals /guides for everything i own.
All the music on my playlists.
Porn.
Porn
Yeah obviously, but what about the rest of my 10s of TBs of porn?
A bunch of e-books and all the SNES roms I can grab.
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.
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.
An LLM pointed at a local copy of Wikipedia, and every book I can get my hands on. I already have hundreds of music CDs, and a couple dozen vinyl records, so I'm good for music.
Is it 100 GB in addition to what I already have saved or 100 GB of total storage? Because if it's 100 GB of total storage then I wouldn't be thinking about downloading, I'll be thinking about what I want to keep.
100GB is ridiculously low nowadays. I don't think I have a single device in regular use (including my phone) with such small storage.
Just my picture archive (that is, pictures I took since I got mit first digital camera) is about 400GB.
Total storage. If you have more, government agents might randonly burst in and confiscate excess storage. 😉
I mean… if we’re optimizing for covert physical presence… you can hide these fuckers in tons of interesting places.
First thing would be to seriously look into data compression, and live with heavily lossy-compressed media (my music collection would be ring-fenced though). Throw out backups of physical media (take the chance on disc-rot); I guess any backups wouldn't be possible in this universe anyway so it will all be left to chance. And then see what's left.
Wikipedia, kernel sources and some LLM models
I'd replace kernel sources with a full Linux distribution (unless this is already part of "essential system files")
And some Stallman memes for good measure
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.
Ultra high-fidelity version of « Sandstorm » and the same copy of the Vern Troyer porn movie with virus that nuked my gf’s computer.
Books. Small games (ROMs or not). Ubuntu (Debian doesn't come with a working desktop). Compress my music collection to AAC192. Stuff like that.
Can I assume that things like movies, TV, and games will still be available in physical form? If so, the Wikipedia backup is the obvious answer
Maybe, maybe not. Remember you are dealing with a scenario where there is a world government desperately trying to stop what they perceive to be "internet addiction".
Wikipedia, music, cool videos.
I wouldn't be too worried. If the internet stops being a thing, we'll just go back to physical media. I imagine there will be huge data storages that sell USBs and DVDs containing specific data people are looking for, so any time I'd want to watch a movie or something I would go to my network of friends and start copying.
Also known as the 90s
Dear OP’s world government, chop chop
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.
Guides how to create my own little internet with other people, 7zip and 99GB of RAM.
Lol bootleg internet?
I think I head about some place where people actually have a bootleg internet due to government censorship. Forgot where I heard about it.
There is big offline network of sharing data on usb drives in Cuba.
Sounds like a cyberpunk trope.
ROMs
A 100GB of ROMs
As much of pornhub that will fit.
This guy will be rich in the post apocalypse
I have a library card and they have plenty bluerays and audiobooks there. I think I'd download all Debian packages and maybe some pornography? Because that seems to be missing in the city library for some reason.
Petition to have Debian packages back in city libraries
Contact info for all my bills. Everything else is ephemeral so may as well wean off it now.
SneakerNet will still exist, so your friends can download different stuff each and transfer it over a local network, or a flash drive. Different people might connect their own local networks to facilitate ease of communication, and boom, you have an internet again. By its very nature of being decentralised, the internet is very difficult to shut down completely.
How to self-host/become your own ISP
Only 100GB? Shit I'm gonna have to decide what porn not to keep...
Sort by date last viewed, delete everything older than a month ago. You're welcome.
But what about those days were you're really in the mood for a particular video from 3 years back?
Or to keep things fresh, only keep the oldest 100gb.
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.Books and music. The more the merrier
Not very much with my slow connection.
RIP
But on the bright side, you get to touch more grass 😅
All my movies and TV and wikipedia.
I watched a 87gb rip of Godzilla Minus One last night... I might need to bring down my bitrate standards if I want to fit all my movies
Download a zillion movies and whole tv series (in highly compressed versions), a zillion music albums and playlists, the 25 GB downloadable version of Wikipedia, a ton of emulators and game roms, and a bunch of apps covering everything i might wanna do like music creation software.
*Redbox throws hands up in frustration
I’m already all set. I’ve been preparing for that for 20 years now. I don’t even need that storage.
Edit: if I had to pare it all down to 100GB it might get tricky!
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.
Stock up on crypto memes.
I’ve been meaning to download the Beats In Space Radio mixes from their archive so I’ll just add that
Save just one Blu-ray backup. 😭 My NAS storage will suddenly be unavailable too or no?