Adam Chace picked a pretty good time to create a data archiving product for turbulent times. I first saw an ad for PrepperDisk on Reddit soon after the election of Donald Trump: “Take lifesaving websites into any emergency,” and “Be SHTF (Shit Hits the Fan) Proof,” the ads read.
PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn't store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse.
I was interested in PrepperDisk because I care about data hoarding and archiving more broadly, but I wanted to talk to Chace after it became clear that a lot of his sales seemed to be a direct result of Trump being elected president.
“Sales increased dramatically in the early part of the new administration as economic uncertainty and even uncertainty about government data prevailed,” Chace told me. “Elon Musk is pulling data off of federal websites, and we want to make sure people realize is like, ‘Hey, this might have a use case even when the internet itself remains up, but there might be political reasons why that data isn’t available.”
“The National Institutes of Health, we have their entire website on our device, and some of their information has been pulled off the internet,” he added. "We have gotten a lot of questions about the content that’s getting deleted. The National Library of Medicine is one we get asked about a lot as it has had content deleted. We’ve had customer ask about whether the Prepper Disk copy of Wikipedia would continue to have entries that ‘might get deleted by the government.’ Yes. Our copy of FEMA’s emergency management website, Ready.gov, has gotten a lot of questions as that website was part of the DOGE sweep. Amusingly I had a customer also ask what the Gulf of Mexico was called on our maps [it’s still the Gulf of Mexico]. It is clear that folks are looking at the overall permanency of data on the Internet and our product as a way to control some of that.”
PrepperDisk is similar to a DIY, open-source project that started in 2012 called Internet in a Box and which has become popular in rural areas in developing countries where internet access is sparse. The idea is basically that you can carry around an external hard drive-sized, mini version of the internet with you that creates a local network your phone or laptop can access.
I was also interested in PrepperDisk because, unlike a lot of “prepper” products, PrepperDisk’s marketing is relatively understated. Chace doesn’t consider himself to be a prepper, and generally doesn’t sell the product in apocalyptic or conspiratorial terms. It feels more like a project designed to preserve and distribute vulnerable data from the internet than a project designed for the end of the world.
“I personally wouldn’t categorize myself as a prepper, though I’m the son of an Eagle Scout and was a Boy Scout myself, and I’ve always been a sort of ‘be prepared’ kind of guy,” Chace said. “I was discussing with my son that, especially in the current climate, there’s a threat to the persistence of information, things we always thought would be available, like government resources from FEMA, suddenly there’s a question mark around that information.”
Chace admits that an enterprising person could (and many do) build similar DIY products with a Raspberry Pi and an external hard drive. But his goal was to build something accessible to nontechnical people.
“Our goal has been to take what some open source products do and make it more of a refined, commercial-grade consumer product,” he added. Despite the name, Chace said a lot of his customers aren’t necessarily preppers, they are largely people who are worried about important websites going offline. Others are people who want to take a smaller version of “the internet” camping in remote areas.Then there are, of course, people who store them in go bags.
“We do have the kind of classic, ‘I’m getting it and putting it in an EMP bag and putting it somewhere safe and hope I never need it,’” he said. “And then we have a customer who bought it basically to have it be available for his kids to use when they’re on vacation.”
