Hey LQ,

I'm trying to build an apocalypse survival kit. Among firearms, food, tools etc I thought it would be great to take the best parts of the internet with me as well. I'd like to have a mirror of wikipedia, family photos, interesting youtube videos, good movies and music, basically anything enjoyable that's digital.

I'd like to build some kind of armored suitcase which houses a bunch of harddrives, presumably all in a raid 1 configuration and I was thinking the easiest way to do this would be with external USB multi-terabyte disks.

So I'd like to know if Linux would be a good OS to do this with and drives I might want to be looking out for to make this happen.

Sounds like an ambitious plan to me.
With most usb hard drives currently sporting USB3.0 interfaces, this may be feasible.
Of course, 3.5" drives usually require their own separate power supply via a mains power adaptor. This is usually 12V so you would need to construct a reliable 12V regulated supply that will run from your emergency power supply. (it will be more efficient to use a battery powered regulator than to use an inverter with the existing power adaptors.)

You might want to look into the WD Personal Cloud solutions as a starting point. Their Linux compatibility situation is a little unclear, however they run on a Linux kernel, so it may be possible to tweak/hack their OS for better Linux compatibility?

Didn't think they let you have firearms in Canada.

There are so many issues here I doubt anyone could venture a guess. In a real situation, I'd guess you'd be spending your time fighting for your life and wouldn't have time to play with youtube.

We'd need to know the amount of data first.

Let's assume:
There is no EMP that would have destroyed electronics.
That you have some power.
That your devices have survived.


I wouldn't consider raid since all of the above trumps redundancy personally. If anything, I'd spread out data over various drives.

You wouldn't have any tech support for either. In the most slight manner, linux may support hardware that you might come across better than windows if you had a few versions of linux on cd or dvd's.