The Offline Library: How to Keep the Useful Internet if the Internet Goes Down

A 2 TB drive and three free apps can hold an encyclopedia, medical references, repair guides, maps and how-to answers for months without a connection. Here is what to download, how big it is and a script that does it for you.

By Rich Vandall · Oct. 30, 2026

The Pentagon wants its bases able to run 90 days cut off from the grid. Your household’s plan probably covers food and water. This page covers the other thing people now reach for a hundred times a day: information. If the internet went down where you live tomorrow, for weeks, what would you still be able to look up?

Quite a lot, if you download it first. Nonprofit projects package whole websites into single files that open with no connection, and the most useful ones fit on one external drive. This is The Despoiler’s working list. We will add to it over time.

What you need

• A drive. A 2 TB USB drive holds everything below with room to spare. The essentials alone fit on a 64 GB phone or thumb drive.
• Kiwix (free; Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone) opens the .zim files below: whole websites, searchable, offline. It can also share the library over your home Wi-Fi so every phone in the house can read it.
• Organic Maps (free; phones) gives offline maps, search and turn-by-turn directions. Download Ohio and the neighboring states inside the app.
• Kolibri (free) runs Khan Academy and other courses offline, if there are students in the house.
• Power. A laptop and phones on a battery bank or small solar panel can read this library for months.

Tier 1: the essentials (about 35 GB)

Get these first: medicine, disaster guides, repair, food and a compact encyclopedia. Each file name links to the folder on Kiwix’s free download server; pick the newest date. Sizes are as of Oct. 30, 2026.

Tier 2: the standard library (about 175 GB more)

The full encyclopedia, textbooks, a dictionary and expert Q&A for months of real questions. Khan Academy adds another 168 GB.

Tier 3: everything else worth having

Big archives for a longer outage, or for a drive you share with the neighborhood. All three tiers come to about 840 GB.

Let a script do it

On Windows, this PowerShell script downloads the newest version of every file above to a drive you choose, tier by tier. If the connection drops, run it again and it picks up where it stopped. Save it, then in PowerShell run:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\get-offline-library.ps1 -Dest E:\OfflineLibrary -Tier 1

Change E: to your drive, then run it again with -Tier 2 (add -Khan for Khan Academy) and -Tier 3. Re-run it every few months: the medical, Q&A and Wikipedia files are rebuilt regularly. As with any script from the internet, you can open it in Notepad and read it first; it only downloads from download.kiwix.org.

Save these by hand: the Miami Valley

No archive covers home. Open each of these and use Print, then Save as PDF:

• Montgomery County Emergency Management: shelters, outage and evacuation plans
• Your power and water utilities’ outage and boil-advisory pages
• Hospitals, urgent care and pharmacies near you, with addresses
• RTA bus routes and schedules
• Dayton Metro Library branches: libraries are often where public Wi-Fi and computers come back first
• Local amateur radio clubs and repeater frequencies
• On paper: phone numbers for family, doctors, insurance, utilities and your bank, and copies of IDs, prescriptions and insurance cards
• The Despoiler: every story we publish is a plain web page you can save the same way

Know an archive that belongs on this list? Tell us.