Our Off Grid Survival Library contains a lot of important information, but there are also a lot of personal documents that you need to safeguard, and we think that it is very important that you have those documents with you where ever you go. Especially off-grid.
Below is a list of the most important personal documents we have in our library:
Social Security Cards
Birth Certificates
Passports
Driver’s Licenses
Health Insurance cards
Pharmacy Plan cards
List of prescription medications
Life Insurance Policies
Bank Account information
Vehicle titles
Home deed
List of user names and passwords
Contacts with addresses and phone numbers
School transcripts
At least one utility bill
Important family photos/videos
We actually maintain two copies of this flash drive. One lives in the Faraday box with the Chromebook and Off Grid Survival Library flash drive, and the other stays in a ziplock bag with a trusted friend who lives several miles away in case of a fire or other situation where our home might be destroyed.
We use the same high-quality flash drives for this information that we use for the survival library storage, and these drives have folders on them for each member of the family to keep things organized. If you don’t know how to save all these documents to a flash drive, visit with the teenager down the street and pay them a little to scan / take pictures of everything and put it on the drive.
Through the months and years we have been doing this, we have come across some of the best off grid survival sites on the planet. Links to some of those sites are provided below.
Please know that these sites are not under our control. Many of them have affiliate links to products. We are not responsible for their content, or what you do with that content.
OffGrid Survival – This site has a wealth of information about hiking, excursions and living off grid. They also have some great links to survival gear available through Amazon.
SurvivalSherpa – Helping each other on the climb to self-reliance and preparedness…the Survival Sherpa way…One step at a time.
Survivopedia– This site provides great information about general preparedness, weapons and food resources.
Ask A Prepper – An amazing collection of prepper projects, and some very interesting takes on what some of us are doing wrong in our preparations.
The Prepared – This site gives practical tips about how to survive off grid. It provides survival gear lists for different levels of prepardness, with Amazon links to make it simple to order the things you need in your kit.
Top Prepper Websites – A great list of prepper websites ranked by votes from actual visitors to the sites. If you want to connect with other Preppers, this is a great starting point.
As you know, there are thousands upon thousands of websites out there to help you get prepared for whatever may come. We will continue to search for useful sites, and will update this page as more are located.
We want to make sure that we have access to good off grid survival maps available in a SHTF or EOTWAWKI situation. Our plan is to be settled in somewhere long before we run out of survival supplies.
In an off grid situation, we won’t have access to “moving maps”, and may not even have access to GPS data. There is a lot of discussion as to whether the satellites would survive an EMP, and even if they do there will be very few computers or handheld devices that survive, and those that do would need internet connection to actually navigate using GPS.
We were lucky enough to find a full set of State maps archived from the USGS (which no longer exists) that show major highways, waterways and some level of geological information. This isn’t Google Maps, but we feel comfortable that we will have the information we need if we have to go on the move or locate new sources of fresh drinkable water.
USGS Maps of All 50 States This archive provides maps of the entire United States that show things like County boundaries, lakes / streams, capital cities and things of that nature. We chose to download the “reference map” files for each of the states to provide us access to major cities, waterways and things of that nature.
As we locate other offline map resources, we will notify our members and update the website.
Are you prepared to take care of yourself and your family if access to emergency medical care is limited because you are completely off-grid? While we are pretty well versed in pre-hospital Emergency Medical Care, we are preparing for a scenario where access to hospitals may be limited or completely unavailable.
We are gathering the best military medical manuals, emergency medical knowledge, and survival tips available anywhere, and making them available offline and off-grid. Some of the information we have brought together includes:
WikEM, The Global Emergency Medicine Wiki This is the world’s largest and most popular emergency medicine open-access reference resource. With close to 4,000 pages about everything from cardiology to vascular topics, this collection focuses on the intervention and treatment of acute medical problems from a clinical perspective. Adding this entire collection to our off-grid library was one of the first priorities as we built our off-grid survival library.
Wikipedia: WikiProject Medicine/Open Textbook of Medicine Even though this resource isn’t focused specifically on emergency medicine, it is a great collection of information about medical care in general. It provides a wealth of information to help you understand what is going on health-wise so that you can make better decisions while off-grid.
Military Medicine Manuals This collection of military medicine manuals was collected across the United States Armed Forces spectrum and includes everything from battlefield medicine to wellness maintenance. A MUST HAVE resource for off-grid living.
We will notify members of additional resources that are converted and optimized for off-grid use, and we will update these pages as they become available.
Most of us have put together an emergency supply of the medications we would need to survive off grid. But, when those run out, we need to be able to turn to Mother Nature for all her herbal medicine resources.
We have collected several amazing resources that help identify the proper plants and processes needed to take advantage of the things we find around us that can support our mental and physical health over the long term.
Pocket Guide to Herbal Medicine This guide provides information about how herbal treatments can be used for different ailments, and to promote overall health. We absolutely love this guide.
World Health Organization – Traditional Herbal Remedies for Primary Health Care This guide provides information about which herbs to use to treat everyday ailments. Due to this being a world-wide resource, not all of the plants mentioned in the book are available in North America. But it provides pictures of the herbs, tells you what regions the plants grow in and provides “recipes” to help prepare the different herbs for administration.
PDR of Herbal Medicine Probably the most definitive book on the pharmacology of herbal agents on the planet. This download link is provided by The Natural Ingredient Resource Center, and their site is a GREAT place to find more ONLINE information about Herbal treatments and processes.
As we find more herbal medicine resources that can be converted to off grid usage, we will update this list.
We are collecting the most effective how-to websites and resources available online and taking them offline, and even OFF-GRID, so we will have this knowledge after a SHTF or EOTWAWKI event. We call it our Off Grid Survival Library.
This entire project started with the question “What are we going to do once our existing survival supplies are used up?” We (the oldest generation in the family) grew up farming, so we know a bit about growing food, hunting, and how to fix things with whatever is laying around. We love our kids and grandkids, but they have never had to do any of those things. It reminded us of the quote:
Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
While we worry about the younger generations being able to be self-sufficient, we also believe in the concept of “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” These resources are our attempt to teach people to fish if it becomes necessary to feed themselves.
To be included in our personal library, these how-to websites must be free to download, readily available to anyone, and useful in a situation where modern-day utilities like electricity, internet, and water were not available. Some of the things we chose to put in our personal off-grid survival library were:
Wikipedia – The Free Encyclopedia: www.wikipedia.com This collection of over 6.5 million articles covers everything from gathering/filtering water, building survival shelters, hunting, trapping, and safely foraging for food. The upper-level categories are nice for browsing, and the direct search for articles ensures that you can find what you need quickly.
WikiHow: www.wikihow.com This website may seem a bit cartoonish, but it is a valuable how-to resource. The information available includes how to desalinate water, build a tent/shelter, stay healthy, and many other topics. There is no direct searchability within the off-grid resources to find things quickly, but the categories help you get what you need pretty quickly.
Low-Tech Magazine – This magazine doesn’t hold itself out to be a Doomsday Prepper guide, but it absolutely does a great job of providing directions on how to do all the things we will have to be doing if the SHTF. It covers everything from how to turn a bicycle into a generator to land/water management projects that provide fresh water, food sources, and a means of processing waste. It is an absolute necessity for off-grid living!
Ted Talks: www.ted.com/talks This website is a collection of videos/lectures by some of the most brilliant people on the planet about issues that matter. We chose to include ten of the most relevant “talks” about things like ten ways the world could end, making filthy water drinkable, creating shelter out of scrap materials, lowering the amount of water needed for crops, and turning trash into toys for learning and entertainment.
We are always looking for new sources of information and will update this list of how-to websites as we discover additional resources that will be useful in an off-grid situation.
Preppers have put together many different bug out and bug in packages ranging from get-home bags to long-term food supplies. But if we are actually going to survive long-term, we must have knowledge, and our source of that knowledge must be dependable. We believe that our off-grid survival library is our most important survival tool. But an off-grid survival library needs an off-grid computer.
When choosing the computer to go into our library kit, the following traits were critical: lightweight, affordable, durable, dependable, and great battery life. But the most important criterion was that it had to remain stable even after long periods of time in storage.
The internet is a great source of information. The problem is that information comes in many different formats, and accessing those formats with a single machine has proven to be problematic. In an effort to decrease the number of software programs needed to access the information, we found that the Zim compression system provided the most content on a single platform. The problem is that many of the titles provided in that format would only work on specific machines or operating systems. Then we stumbled on a java script application that worked with the Chrome browser almost flawlessly.
Given the above criteria, we believe that the best platform for this project is the Chromebook. It is lightweight, durable, dependable, and has a battery life that outlasts many cell phones these days. Plus, its operating system is CHROME, making it THE obvious choice for our off-grid computer.
Our current off-grid library setup includes an 11-inch refurbished/used Chromebook that has been completely wiped clean, reloaded, and optimized for off-grid use. We also use high-quality (greater than 120 GB/s read speed) flash drives optimized for the Chromebook, loaded with over 200 GigaBytes of survival information.
Warning: Do not use cheap or slow flash drives because they are very unreliable. They take extended periods of time to load even the smallest of resources. We try to cut costs everywhere we can because we know these units are going into storage to (hopefully) never be seen again. But the flash drives are the exception to this rule. We don’t want to open our kit after SHTF and find that our cheap storage choice caused us to lose what we worked so hard to gather.
These laptops are thoroughly checked, erased, reloaded, and optimized for off-grid use with the information gathered.
