My prep drive review
A while back, I downloaded The Preparedness Encyclopedia (direct download). I reached out to the author, Chris, to ask whether he had any video content that I could download. It turns out that he offers a hard disk product where you can choose content from a variety of video channels, along with maps, books, and offline websites and he will send it to you in the mail. He offers different size drives depending how much you want to spend. I got the 1TB USB drive.
Being the first customer, he asked if I would write an honest review of my thoughts. My biggest issue with the experience was just looking up all of the different channels to decide, "Do I want this particular channel's videos? Are they going to be useful to me personally?"
The video quality is good enough. I am still to see small components well enough to repeat what is in the videos. So it's fine. I'd rather have more videos at a slightly lower quality than a fraction of the number at a higher quality. I actually ran out of space on my NAS, so I had to upgrade that as well! It was a good excuse to do that. The 1TB USB drive worked fine and transferred files to my computer at a reasonable speed, but I don't think I would rely on that single drive alone.
The prep drive contains a massive amount of information, including offline maps, Wikipedia, and gigabytes of practical and educational videos. If the Internet ever goes down, or the electrical grid goes out for an extended period of time, you will have a valuable resource. Secondly, Big Tech has already tried to shut down a gardening channel whose media is included on this drive. So it's good to have a backup for yourself considering the pro-censorship culture world we live in today. If they're going after gardeners, then pretty much no one is safe from the insane, anti-thinking, pro-corporate censorship.
The other issue is with all of the AI garbage quality content taking over. It would be ideal to download Wikipedia and other base sources of information now, before the info-pollution gets far worse. Many books are now written by AI and have incorrect and nonsensical information.
The maps are Android specific and require a program called Alpine Quest. I would have liked to see QGIS compatible maps, but I think I can install an Android emulator in Linux.
Side note: If you use Kiwix to view the Wikipedia pages offline, please block the program from Internet access at your router or software firewall level. The auto-update feature does not play nice and I even filed a bug with their developers about it. You don't want to program to auto-update you to a new version and find out that it's not compatible with your OS and find out that you can't view any Wikipedia pages offline anymore.
Chris was willing to download several playlists from channels that I specifically asked for, which was really nice. The other positive thing about his efforts is that he was thoughtful about his channel and video selection. He used a 5 point criteria where videos are on topic, of good quality (avoiding clickbait/fear), have good breadth, don't overlap, and are non-region specific. He talks more about his criteria on his site.
Chris was very helpful and provided a ton of of suggestions. He answered my questions and gave me his insight. It was a great experience to work with him on getting my drive set up. As I said above, the only issue I had was with all of the potential choices for content. So you may need to figure out what you want to prioritize. Spend a little extra and get the 1TB drive. You'll be happy you did!