If the internet went down permanently tomorrow, what would you download today?
Why I don't keep my personal stuff on SaaS products.
Published Oct 20, 2025 · Around 2 minutes to read
When my 600GB hard drive crashed 10 years ago, I lost all my photos, games, and documents. I decided to never store anything on an external hard drive. Since then, I’ve transitioned into being cloud-first for all my storage. And it’s been great. I can access all of my stuff from anywhere, on any device. And I don’t need to worry about hardware failures.
But I’ve been feeling uneasy lately about having so much of my digital life online. I know my data is being tracked and trained on. I traded privacy for ease.
And being on the cloud doesn’t mean you won’t lose your data. A site can be taken down for any reason, like the graveyard of Google products. Or you can get hacked, like my FB was (although I don’t miss it). Today’s AWS outage motivated me to get my life offline.
I've been thinking about going offline ever since I read Derek SIvers's Tech Independence article: Tech Independence. I fully agree with the philosophy. But I've been lazy about starting. To my credit, I did setup a 4TB TrueNAS server to download all of my cloud data. I just need to start downloading it.
I’ve already downloaded Wikipedia and a couple of LLMs (GPT-OSS and QWEN).
Infrastructure is precarious. I’ve lived through the 2003 Northeast Blackout, Hurricane Sandy, and COVID. Infrastructure works great, but it can fail. And I want to be ready.
What other resources would you recommend downloading?
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