cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17748238

TIL That the entirety of Wikipedia is only ~100Gb and you can download it for offline use

In light of the recent Crowdstrike crash revealing how weak points in IT infrastructure can have wide ranging effects, I figured this might be an interesting one.

The entirety of wikipedia is periodically uploaded here, along with many other useful wikis and How To websites (ex. iFixit tutorials and WikiHow): https://download.kiwix.org/zim

You select the archive you want, then the language and archive version (for example, you can get an archive with no pictures, to save on space). For the totality of the english wikipedia you’d select the “wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim”

The archives are packed as .zim files, which can be read with the Kiwix app completely offline.

I have several USBs I keep that have some of these archives along with the app installer. In the event of some major catastrophe I’d at least be able to access some potentially useful information. I have no stake in Kiwix, and don’t know if there are other alternative apps and schemes, just thought it was neat.

  • 667@lemmy.radioEnglish
    5·
    4 months ago

    If you’re on nearly any flavor of UNIX (Linux, MacOS, etc.), you can run rsync on a scheduled basis via crontab.

    Only limit is going to be, so far as I am aware, the download is provided as a compressed file, so you’ll have to download the whole thing, uncompress it locally and then do a selective update.