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.”

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