Just built one of those using Dietpi as the OS and NVME M.2 for the storage. I have many different ZIMs and running different services and only using about 270GB.

Works great for offline use. Probably should add an ISO or 2 as well.

Do you recommend adding anything else to it?

For instance, OSM maps?

I've been thinking about running the Kiwix app + OSMAnd on an old Android phone and auto updating it once a year.

You can easily download planet.osm, I think it's a couple of TB for the compressed file.

It's probably hundreds of thousands of HTML files, no? What is the fear about being able to edit or not?

And the english with no pictures is even smaller

And you can use Kiwix to setup a locally hosted wikipedia using the data dumps

How would you access the info if electricity permanently goes out?

You'd first have to buy a phone that can run postmarketos and these are much rarer than I wish they were. Is there even anything new that can run it? Pine64 stopped making phones and said they'll make a new one when they can make it RISC-V.

Fairphone maybe I guess. 4 is listed as a supported device, but someone has gotten it working on 6 too.

Cause if ya wanna go overboard like I did, 1TB of NVME storage, can add with SD Card if necessary. 16GB RAM. Very little learning curve for my part as I use SBCs often. Plus almost every Docker container and program I want works on RPi without any hassle.

There's also more robust guides and community for RPi.

Just my thoughts.

Last I checked (3 years ago) postmarketOS drained the pinephone battery in record time :(

The pornhub collapse should have taught the average person that.

When I downloaded it years ago it was 1.8TB. It’s crazy how big the archive is. The smaller one is just so it’s accessible to most people.

I’m not sure, but I do think it’s just flash

It's more that flash NAND uses a small electric charge to keep the NAND gates in the correct configuration. Over time, that charge dissipates. If you power the storage device every once in a while, you minimize these chances.

Here's a video explaining why it happens to Wii U's after being powered off for a while. https://youtu.be/JHME4zLs6Qs

User older flash tech can be useful here. You might not always need the highest density storage if you want to maintain files for a long time. Getting stuff built in a much larger process node makes for a much more stable form of storage.

Thanks but even though it's on a plugged HDD I don't even care for any of that data. What I mean is that none of that data is sensitive. It might be useful, potentially, but it's not unique. What I mean is that if somehow my .zim file for Wikipedia was corrupted I could download it again from https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&category=wikipedia or elsewhere in ~30min (just checked).

What I'm trying to highlight here is more the process than the actual outcome.

TL;DR: yes, if one is actually serious about just getting and storing, they should verify periodically if the data is indeed fine. What I do want to highlight though is to first know how to do it at all. Anyway, you are right that for a proper solution on the long run one must understand how (cold) storage actually works. My heuristic is that it's like can food (which I don't use much), it might last a while, but not forever.

Commenting inline :

-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 103G Jul  6  2024 wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim
# encyclopedia Wikipedia English with images and more
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  81G Apr 22  2023 gutenberg_mul_all_2023-04.zim
# Project Gutenberg, book collection in multiple languages
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  75G Jul  7  2024 stackoverflow.com_en_all_2023-11.zim
# StackOverflow, programming questions and answers
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  74G Mar 10  2024 planet-240304.osm.pbf
# OpenStreetMap low resolution for the whole World
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 3.8G Oct 18 06:55 debian-13.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso
# Debian base ISO
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 2.6G May  7  2023 ifixit_en_all_2023-04.zim
# iFixit colection of guides to fix appliances
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 1.6G May  7  2023 developer.mozilla.org_en_all_2023-02.zim
# Web development documentation
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 931M May  7  2023 diy.stackexchange.com_en_all_2023-03.zim
# Do It Yourself Q&A
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 808M Jun  5  2023 wikivoyage_en_all_maxi_2023-05.zim
# WikiVoyage, the version of Wikipedia for traveling
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 296M Apr 30  2023 raspberrypi.stackexchange.com_en_all_2022-11.zim
# Raspberry Pi Q&A
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 131M May  7  2023 rapsberry_pi_docs_2023-01.zim
# Rasspberry Pi documentation
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 100M May  7  2023 100r-off-the-grid_en_2022-06.zim
# Off the grid documents
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  61M May  7  2023 quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com_en_all_2022-11.zim
# Quantum computer Q&A
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  45M May  7  2023 computergraphics.stackexchange.com_en_all_2022-11.zim
# Computer graphics Q&A
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  37M May  7  2023 wordnet_en_all_2023-04.zim
# Graph of words in English
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  23M Jul 17  2023 kiwix-tools_linux-armv6-3.5.0-1.tar.gz
# Kiwix to read .zim files
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  16M Oct  6 21:32 be-stib-gtfs.zip
# public transport database in Brussels, Belgium
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 3.8M Oct  6 21:32 be-sncb-gtfs.zip
# train transport database in Belgium
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 2.3M May  7  2023 termux_en_all_maxi_2022-12.zim
# Termux, Linux tooling on Android, documentation in English
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 1.9M May  7  2023 kiwix-firefox_3.8.0.xpi
# Kiwix Web Extension for the Firefox browser

if you remove topics you are not interessed it can shrink even more

I'm certain that when UK forces DigitalID upon the nation it will be a requirement for access to every website