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Ask HN: If you could bring 500 gigs to a deserted island, what would you bring?

by dasmithii on 7/31/21, 4:35 AM with 6 comments

Say you were going to a deserted island with electricity but no internet connection. What 500 gigabytes worth of data/programs/etc would you bring?

Assume you’d have a computer available to you with a functioning OS of some sort

  • by mindcrime on 7/31/21, 5:01 AM

    PDF's of books like

    Boat Building for Dummies

    Survival on Desert Islands

    The SAS Survival Manual

    US Army Rangers Survival Manual

    9005 Fire Starting Techniques

    The entire electronic back archive of American Survival Guide magazine

    And, of course, every episode of Gilligan's Island.

    The rest of the space would probably go to music. Mostly metal, some hip hop, some synthwave, a little classical, and like 2 country songs for those really rare occasions when I actually want to hear country music.

  • by speedgoose on 7/31/21, 9:39 AM

    A Wikipedia dump, a large illegal collection of ebooks, a few favourite software and video games, and porn.

  • by anigbrowl on 7/31/21, 5:20 AM

    It kinda depends on whether I need to plot an escape from this desert island or I'm just taking a year off! In the latter case, Python and maybe C dev tools & libraries, and some good development books. I feel like I'd want to reserve half the space for data I'd like to process, mostly big social media/forum archives of various sorts.

    If there's space, also a few games. I don't know what I'd do about reading material for relaxation, though, kinda depends on how long I'm gonna be there.

  • by mikewarot on 7/31/21, 5:06 AM

    Assuming a visit, not a move, everything currently on my laptop, maybe a movie or two. I've got compilers, git, Wikipad, GIMP, space for some photos, Hugin for stitching panoramas. I'd bring an empty spare drive for backups.

    Things get squirrely if we're talking about a permanent move, restarting civilization after a catastrophe, or travel in time or space.

  • by rektide on 7/31/21, 5:12 AM

    a Debian build mirror. some David Bowie & porno for pyros. total annihilation, empire of the fading sun, and star renegades. deno, nodejs, ceph, kubernetes, my helm charts. my sources. vim. data exports from Google & twitter.

  • by joshxyz on 8/1/21, 2:37 AM

    Definitely "How To Get Out Of Deserted Island ASAP for Dummies".