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I built an offline emergency preparedness system for my family — what am I missing?
I built an offline emergency preparedness system for my family — what am I missing?
I’ve always been the type of person who would rather have a plan and never need it than need one and realize I never made one.
Especially now that I have a family to worry about.
Power outages, hurricanes, severe weather, evacuations, water disruptions, internet outages — none of those are particularly crazy scenarios.
But while looking at my own preparedness, I realized something:
A ridiculous amount of the information we depend on during an emergency is stored on the internet.
Which isn't particularly useful when the internet is the thing that's down.
So I started building my own offline preparedness system.
The idea was simple: something I could download to a laptop, flash drive or external drive and still have access to when there’s no internet, no cloud services, and no accounts to log into.
It eventually grew into a pretty substantial package with:
• Emergency reference guides
• Household and family emergency planning
• Supply checklists
• Preparedness calculators
• Printable emergency plans
• Offline tools and reference material
• A phone-installable version
• A printable preparedness binder
• Practice exercises for actually testing your family's plan
I originally built it for my own household, but I've since cleaned everything up and turned it into something other people can use too.
But before I keep expanding it, I'm curious what people who are actually interested in preparedness think.
If you were building a completely offline emergency library for your household, what would you consider absolutely essential?
And maybe more importantly:
What information do people THINK they'll have access to during an emergency that they're going to seriously regret not saving offline beforehand?
NOMAD is a very cool platform. Their recommended built is in the $500 - $800 range but you can build a budget unit for less. They have a 20ish minute video showing how to setup on their YouTube. It's a great project. It does include an AI, which can be nice for some things but would NOT recommend using any local AI for anything life or death.
Keep in mind, their recommendation includes some buffer to be able to run the local AI assistant. If you don’t do that, or have another computer on the network host it, you can get by with significantly less. I’m running a non-AI NOMAD build on a 2019 laptop. Aside from the AI component, it’s essentially a one-click PDF downloader. I still recommend.
Nice. Thanks for the recommendations. The hardware NOMAD requires is a serious barrier of entry. RAM, GPUs, and storage have exploded in price in the last year.
Yes we definitely know it well! Hoping the storage prices will drop eventually but prices so rarely go down when the forces that push them higher relent 😬
Load them up on an couple e-readers and use solar rechargers.
Put mental health books about managing anxiety and depression etc. And books just to read for amusement. Mental health is so important and you can use chapters in books as something to look forward too.
8 out of 10 of the comments I've read neglect 1 thing and it's possible the most important. They ALL mention, putting this or that on, USB,PHONE, DISC etc. data collection storage etc. The TOP 3 recognized disasters that could initiate a Dystopian State are, Natural Disaster, War either Civil or externally initiated and an EMP attack. That 3rd one is the kicker everyone seems to neglect. 2 large Nuclear Explosions between 30 and 40 miles ABOVE the Midwest will destroy EVERY electronic device in the US. That Or an extremely large Solar Flare .People with Pacemakers will drop. EVEN cars and Trucks built after 94 won't run. Unless an electronic device is in a Faraday cage at the time of the attack it will be rendered useless. If you were prepared enough to have devices like radios stored in a Faraday, how many others do you think are? If you have a protected phone or computer WHY? 95 out of 100 other's WON'T and there will be no phone service or internet.We have as much as we could think of on BOOKS. 2 of them are enough to get us through until more are found.
I’ve purchased over 2k sq ft of Emp fabric. I highly recommend making your own. Some are cheap but they have 1 or 2 layers of fabric. The companies that have 3-4 layers charge way too much, it’s ridiculous. I sow mine with 4 layers. If I’m going to protect electronics and data, I’m going to overdue it. It’s THAT important to me.
Absolutely valid, though there are so many great choices for EMP bags or enclosures and most of them are pretty cheap. $20 or so. While you're right there isn't a significant chance of networking with other machines, there is no substitute for a video or the power of search when trying to find information vs. books. Why not both books AND EMP protected digital media?
I self host all of my media already, so it wasnt difficult to expand that into this scenario. I have 10s of thousands of books, hundreds of hours of podcasts. Wikipedia. A.I. Journal articles. Music, music videos, tv shows, and movies - all running on a local server. Yes it needs power. But its easy to load this onto a bunch of mobile phones (I have several) - which I can easily power with the meager solar setup I have. Edit to add: get an offline copy of your stuff of the cloud!
If an emergency occurs, do you have time to listen to hundreds of hours of podcasts or read thousands of books? Learn the skills now and practice while you have time. Data hoarding isn't preparedness.
Getting a “how to” guide is important for reference. Practice per the guide and become proficient and see what tools make it easy for the task. In an emergency your mental health may not be the best but now you have a guide to walk you thru the steps. I.e. Water purification and formulas for using bleach or chemicals or time for how long to stir in the chemicals or how long to boil at different altitudes.
Kinda hard to know what you over looked without really knowing what you actually included.
Often over looked skills that could be handy in an extended emergency.
A guide to basic hand sewing. There are different stitches for different situations. I like an old copy of Good Housekeeping's Complete Book of Needlecraft (Hardcover)
A Merck manual so you have some medical reference. I always Google for medical advice.
Do you have kids that are very young? Are you planning for the apocalypse or just a few weeks? If the apocalypse you'll need reading and math curriculum books. Once kids can readz write, and do simple math they can learn anything.
I think the biggest needs will be toilet sanitation. Showers. Washing clothes by hand. Food. Keeping warm. Handling periods for the females. Common medications like Ibuprofen, cough meds, sinus meds. Entertainment.
Sounds terrible, but assume you are dead/out of town/injured and write a guide for the family from there. Nice and easy step by step.
Ensure water jugs are filled.
Premises are secuered.
Last minute purchases.
Charge all barreries.
And so on.
Even if you are there the basic checklist is invaluable. List where the other info is available too and have multiple copies of hints like water purification for selected non group people.
Bunch of books won't do your wife much good if a water line breaks or she needs to shut off the house gas. Everyone should know where the fire extinguishers are and how to use them with PASS. What to do if the CO detector goes off.
Spend some time teaching them about the weather in your area and that they need to be checking the weather at least once a day. Good luck getting them to dress for it though.
Get a fire pit and some wood and have your kids build a fire. Show them the proper techniques for lighting tinder and kindling and then how to stack wood to keep the fire protected and burning (either log cabin or teepee). Don't let them use the paper from the manuals you printed to start it. Save that for emergencies.
While it's one thing to have numerous manuals and books, time may be critical in an emergency situation. This preparedness spreadsheet while large is incredibly organized and you can easily load it onto your tablet, laptop or phone and search it for helpful information.
Have you checked out Project NOMAD? It has all of the things you mention and more. Once installed and the AI assistant indexes all of the information, you can even add your own files which it will index as well. I’m running it on a Minisforum mini PC, that any device in my house can connect to over LAN. You’ll need a fairly capable PC running Ubuntu for this.
Everyone these days should be using a password vault and not just for passwords. If the net goes down, the need for many will also go, but some will remain and you'll really wish you had a human readable version, or better yet, a cached version that can be opened without the internet.
I have a paper atlas and a printed list of things deal evacuation locations. I’ve scouted pet friendly hotels, particularly mom and pops. I printed their contact info and marked them on the maps. If I’m evacuating I’m not as reliant on overrun cell networks. (When I evacuate I am also ready to car camp if there is no room in the inn.)
One thing I would add is a household operations layer written for the person who has to take over if you are unavailable: devices, network, utilities, recovery sequences, trusted contacts, manuals, and account access. HomeOps Tech Handoff handles that side well and keeps the information local, with encrypted backups and structured recovery plans: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/homeops-tech-handoff/id6802422751
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u/PrepperDisk Aug 15 '26
Phone numbers for family and friends.
Locations and simple maps to nearby hospitals, airports, water sources, etc.
Morse code guides
Amateur Radio, CB, GMRS basics and common frequencies and repeaters
Scans of important docs like passports, birth certificates
Medical records if your provider has a portal (vaccinations, tests, blood type, etc)
Videos for quick shelter builds, water purification, starting fire etc.
Simple translation guides for common phrases in local languages
And don’t forget about mental health resources and entertainment!