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The offline library

Just in case

You can build your own offline internet. Wikipedia, the TED talks, Khan Academy, the repair guides and an emergency FAQ, sitting on your own drive and opening with the wifi off. The videos play too. It is free, it is legal, and you can do most of it in an evening.

Under that there are 96 free PDFs from FEMA, the EPA, the National Weather Service, the Red Cross, the USDA, the Geological Survey and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. That half is the ten-minute version - one click each, no software, and it works on a phone. Every link was checked on September 20th, 2026. Download them while the internet works, because the whole point of having them is the day it doesn't.

Start with the phone kit Show me the whole list

Build the offline internet Just download all the PDFs

An open cream book seen from above, a red-nailed hand resting on its left page and heart sunglasses on its corner.

The library

Everything, sorted

The other half of the page, and the quick half. 96 PDFs, one click each, nothing to install. Search it, filter it, tick things off as you go. Sizes are the real file sizes, so you can see what fits on a phone and what belongs on a stick.

0 of 96 saved 0 MB of about 261 MB

Every file has its own download button. Tick the ones you want and the bar at the foot of the screen walks you through them in one go. What you have saved is remembered in this browser, on this device only - nothing is sent anywhere.

Kits and plans

17 files 30.2 MB

The lists, the plans and the wallet cards. Start here.

First aid

2 files 5.6 MB

Reference only. Reading a manual is not the same as being trained.

Water and sanitation

6 files 17.2 MB

How to make water safe to drink, and how to clean up after a flood.

Food and canning

11 files 19.6 MB

Storing food, and putting it up without poisoning anybody. The USDA set is all seven guides.

Power and generators

4 files 5.7 MB

What to do when the lights go out, and how not to be killed by the generator.

Solar and off-grid

1 file 3.4 MB

One guide. Homeowner solar basics, from the Department of Energy.

Radio and alerts

4 files 4.0 MB

Weather radio, ham bands, and what the different alert sounds actually mean.

Maps and navigation

4 files 13.2 MB

Reading a paper map, since the one on the phone needs a signal.

Fire safety

11 files 23.9 MB

Escape plans, smoke alarms, carbon monoxide.

Weather

19 files 43.3 MB

Tornadoes, flooding, heat, lightning and ice.

Field manuals

3 files 56.6 MB

Public releases. Survival, first aid, land navigation. The big files.

Old books

1 file 14.6 MB

The 1911 Boy Scout handbook. Out of copyright, still useful.

Mental health

1 file 1.8 MB

What happens to people afterward, and what helps.

Pets

1 file 1.6 MB

Go bag, ID, food and water for the animals.

Other hazards

8 files 3.3 MB

The rest of the Ready.gov series. Most of these will not apply where you live, which is the point of having them - you are not always where you live.

For children

3 files 17.2 MB

The same advice, written for a child. Free from FEMA and the Red Cross.

Then add your own county

Nothing above this knows where your shelters are or which creek comes up first. Three places publish that, wherever you live: your county emergency management agency, your nearest National Weather Service office, and your state extension service.

Mine, as a worked example

I am in Memphis, so these are the 8 I added, about 16 MB. They show you the shape of what to look for. The weather radio sheet is the one I would put on a phone.

And a map of it

And the hazards they are written for

  • Tornadoes
  • Flash and river flooding
  • Extreme heat
  • Thunderstorms and lightning
  • Winter ice storms
  • Outages and generator fumes

How to actually do this

Four steps, one afternoon

A folder of PDFs on a laptop that needs power and wifi is not a backup. Two copies in two places is.

The one exception

Or take the phone kit as one file

One download, 18 MB, the same 14 documents in a folder with a note inside saying where every one of them came from. This is the only thing on this page I keep a copy of. Everything else goes one at a time. Copies taken September 20th, 2026, and the buttons in the list above always go to the agency's current version.

Download the phone kit Zip file 18 MB 14 documents

  1. Put the phone kit on your phone

    14 files, about 19.8 MB all together. That is smaller than one video. Save them into your phone's Files app, not a cloud folder that needs a signal to open.

  2. Put everything on a USB stick

    All 96 come to about 261 MB, so any stick you already own will hold them with room to spare. The big field manuals belong here rather than on the phone.

  3. Put a second stick somewhere else

    A relative's house, your desk at work, the glovebox. The failure you are planning for is the one that takes out your house.

  4. Print the short ones

    The supply checklist, the family contact card and the tornado one-pager. Paper works with a dead battery. There is a print button at the top of the library for the list itself.

Asked in the comments

The gear people ask about

Paper and a battery you already own cover most of it. If you want more than that, this is what I would get.

If you lose power for days, not hours

To keep the refrigerator running

A fridge uses one to one and a half kilowatt-hours a day, and it spikes hard every time the compressor kicks on. That is why the small batteries above will not do it.

This is the one I actually own. I bought a Delta Max 2000 in 2021 when I moved into a travel trailer, and I have run it ever since. EcoFlow stopped making that model - the Delta 3 Max above replaced it and holds the same 2048 watt hours for less than I paid. I run mine with an extra battery, which roughly doubles it. Check any extra battery against your exact model first, because they do not swap between generations.

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Before you start

  • This is not medical, legal or engineering advice. It is a list of documents other people wrote. First aid and CPR are hands-on skills - read the manual, then go and take the class.
  • Never eat a wild plant on the strength of one guide. The foraging document is an introduction and nothing more.
  • When something is actually happening, follow your county emergency agency, your nearest National Weather Service office, and your local fire and police. A PDF from last year does not know about today.
  • Take the small files first. Water is 20 MB and the emergency medicine one is 357 MB. Those on your phone will do more for you than 119 GB of Wikipedia you never found room for. The big ones belong on a stick.
  • These files come from other people and they move. Every address here was checked on September 20th, 2026. If a link is dead, search the agency's own site rather than trusting a mirror, and check back once a year.
  • Two things are missing on purpose. The CDC would not hand its files over, so get their water and pet sheets from cdc.gov while you are online. And WikiHow came off the offline list at the end of 2024, at WikiHow's request, so there is no free copy of it now.

Free, and it stays free

Take most of the library in one download

Eighty-seven of them in one zip, sorted into the same folders, with a text file inside naming the source of every one. 211 MB, kept for nothing by the Internet Archive.

A few are missing on purpose. The Red Cross, NFPA, ARRL and WHO files belong to the people who wrote them, so they stayed above as links. Almost everything in the zip is US government work, which already belongs to you.

None of it is mine to sell. It did take a while to build, though, so if it saved you an afternoon there is a hat below. If not, take the files anyway.

Download the zip 211 MBVenmoPayPal

While you are here

What I actually report on

I live in Memphis, and I spend most of my time on public records. For the past year that has meant the data centers going up here. The gas turbines next to Boxtown. The battery yards over the aquifer we drink from. What they use, and who pays for it.

That records work is also how I knew where to find the county hazard plans in the list above.

Read the xAI FilesGet the next one by email

The bigger version

Or build the whole offline internet

Everything above is PDFs. This next part is Wikipedia, TED talks, Khan Academy and the repair guides, sitting on your own drive and opening with the wifi off. It takes an evening and it is free, and you do not need any of it to use the files above.

Whole websites saved as single files, opening with the wifi off. Wikipedia with the pictures. Every TED talk with the video. Khan Academy. The repair guides with a photograph of every step. Somebody sells a box with all of this on it. Nearly all of it is free, and you can do it yourself in an evening.

  1. Install one free program

    It is called Kiwix. Free, open source, going since 2007, and it runs on a phone, a tablet, a Mac, a Windows computer or a Linux one. You install it once and that is the last setting up you do.

  2. Download the pieces you want

    Each one below is a single file. The 20 MB water guide or all 119 GB of Wikipedia is the same handful of clicks. No account, no subscription, nothing to pay.

  3. Turn the wifi off and read them

    Kiwix opens them like web pages, search box and all, with nothing connected. That is the whole trick, and it works on a phone in a field.

Get KiwixBrowse everything they have

How much room do I need?

  • The phone kit, 14 documents20 MB
  • All 96 PDFs, plus my 8 local ones277 MB
  • Those, plus the small offline files that fit on a phoneAbout 2 GB
  • The sensible version of everything belowAbout 28 GB
  • Every single file at its biggestAbout 660 GB

That last jump is three files that only come in one size: the scanned book library at 205 GB, Khan Academy at 168 GB and every TED talk at 85 GB. Leave those out and everything else fits on a cheap USB stick.

  • Reference

    An offline assistant you can ask

    Survival LLM is a free app that puts an AI on your own computer, along with a library a lot like the one on this page: Wikipedia, the medical references, the repair guides, Ready.gov and the Army manuals. You type a question and it answers from those files with the wifi off, and it shows you the passage it used so you can check it. It runs on a computer, not a phone, and it needs a fairly new one: a Mac from 2020 or later with at least 16 GB of memory, or a Windows PC. Setting it up takes an afternoon. It isn't sold through an app store, so your computer will warn you the first time you open it. Check what it tells you against the source it shows, the same as anything else.

    The app brangus.io

  • Crisis · take these first

    Water, food and after the disaster

    Short, practical and built for exactly this. How to make water safe to drink, how to cook and keep food with no power, and what to do in the days after something has already happened to your house.

    Kiwix library library.kiwix.org

  • Crisis · take these first

    Living without the grid

    Not an emergency library. This is 900 documents on how people who have never had reliable power actually live - purifying water, keeping food without a fridge, building and wiring without mains, growing and storing a crop. Everything above is for three days without power. This one is for when it does not come back. A third of it is water, food and construction, and that is the third worth having. The health quarter is largely from the 1980s and 1990s, so read it as history rather than as medical advice.

    Kiwix library library.kiwix.org free since 2003 at cd3wdproject.org

  • Crisis · take these first

    Medical references

    Three sizes. The small one is the basics. WikEM is the wiki emergency doctors actually look things up in. The big one is every health article on Wikipedia, about 70,000 of them.

    Kiwix library library.kiwix.org

  • Reference

    Wikipedia

    All of it, offline, in one file. Pick your size - the bigger the file, the more articles and the more pictures. The top articles without pictures is the one that fits on a phone and still answers most things.

    • Top 100 articles318 MB
    • Top articles, no pictures2.6 GB
    • Everything, intros only13 GB
    • Everything, no pictures49 GB
    • Everything, with pictures119 GB

    Kiwix library all the sizes, with downloads

  • Crisis

    Ready.gov, the whole site

    The Ready.gov printables are already in the list further up this page. This is the entire website instead, every page of it, not just the sheets they made to be printed.

    Kiwix library library.kiwix.org

  • Comms and navigation

    Street maps

    Organic Maps is a free app built on OpenStreetMap. It searches and gives you directions with the phone in airplane mode, and it has no ads and no tracking in it. Download the states you want before you need them. There's also a browsable map file for a computer.

    The app organicmaps.app

  • Reference

    Repair guides

    iFixit, the site that walks you through opening a phone, a laptop, a washing machine or a car and putting it back together. Step by step, with photographs of each step.

    Kiwix library library.kiwix.org

  • Reference

    Questions people already asked

    Stack Exchange is thousands of real questions answered by people who do the thing for a living. The small ones are the useful ones here, and they are small enough to take all of them.

    Kiwix library library.kiwix.org

  • Comms and navigation

    Emergency phrases

    Wikivoyage writes phrasebooks for dozens of languages, and every one of them has a section for when something has gone wrong. It's the free version of a phrase translator, and it fits on a phone.

    • All of it, no pictures260 MB
    • With pictures1 GB

    Kiwix library Wikivoyage, with downloads

  • Comms and navigation

    Ham radio repeaters

    RepeaterBook is the free directory of amateur radio repeaters for the United States and about 70 other countries. The app keeps the whole database on the phone, so it works with no signal at all.

    • The phone appFree
    • The directoryFree

    The app repeaterbook.com

  • Reference

    Free books

    Project Gutenberg, the same one as the button at the top of this page. More than 79,000 books whose copyright has run out, and you can take as many as you want. There is an offline copy of the whole library, or you can pick them one at a time from the website while you still have a signal.

    Kiwix library library.kiwix.org or gutenberg.org

  • Reference

    TED talks

    Every talk they have, with the video. It's the second biggest thing on this list, so unless you have a spare hard drive sitting there, take one subject pack instead of the lot.

    Kiwix library library.kiwix.org

  • Crisis

    The survival bookshelf

    Survivor Library is thousands of scanned books from before the grid - farming, building, medicine, and making things by hand. It is by far the biggest file here, so this one is a hard drive and not a stick.

    Kiwix library library.kiwix.org

  • Reference

    Khan Academy

    Math, science, history and computing, taught in short videos. Worth knowing before you start it that the free copy was made in March 2023 and nobody has built a newer one, so it is a few years behind the website.

    Kiwix library library.kiwix.org

  • Something to do

    Films that play with no signal

    There are no TV shows or Hollywood films anywhere in this, and there never will be - nobody is allowed to give those away. What does exist is the Blender open movie project. Animated short films, properly made, released for anyone to copy. They are the only real films on this page and they play with the wifi off.

    Kiwix library library.kiwix.org

  • Something to do

    Puzzles, chess and the board game shelf

    For the second evening, once the batteries are sorted and everyone has read the tornado sheet. Thousands of puzzles with the workings shown, every chess question serious players have asked each other, and a library of board and role-playing game rules big enough to last a winter.

    Kiwix library library.kiwix.org

  • Something to do

    A comic and a book of quotations

    Small, and better than they sound. The xkcd archive comes with a page explaining every joke, which is its own kind of entertainment. Wikiquote is every quotation Wikipedia has sourced, and it is a surprisingly good thing to wander around in.

    Kiwix library library.kiwix.org

  • Reference

    CrashCourse

    History, science, literature and government, taught in short videos by people who are good at it. This is the one to take if there are teenagers in the house and the schools are shut. It is large, so it wants a drive with room on it.

    Kiwix library library.kiwix.org