A couple of years into taking preparedness more seriously, I’ve accumulated quite a bit of stuff.

Emergency food. Water. Camp stoves. Radios. Flashlights. Backup power. Medical supplies. Tools.

But one of the bigger gaps in my preparedness only became obvious when I actually ran into it:

What happens when I need information and I can’t just look it up?

That became very real for my family during the bomb cyclone that hit Western Washington in November 2024.

The storm was at its worst overnight. Our power went out, and at the time I didn’t have the backup power setup I have today. I didn’t have a working generator ready to go, and I didn’t have the battery power stations that have since become part of our emergency setup.

By the next day, cell service was spotty.

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

Wireless data was pretty much nonexistent.

And suddenly, the little computer we all carry around in our pockets wasn’t nearly as useful as it normally is.

The things I wanted weren’t particularly exotic.

I wanted to check the power outage.

I wanted updated weather information.

And, eventually, we wanted entertainment.

Normally all three of those things are almost effortless.

Open an app.

Refresh a webpage.

Turn on a streaming service.

But without reliable data, those things disappeared very quickly.

At some point we even had to leave the area to get usable cellular service. I honestly don’t remember how far we drove before things started working normally again.

That detail probably doesn’t matter very much.

What I remember is the realization that getting information had suddenly become something we had to travel to do.

That stuck with me.

We did have some things available offline.

There were downloaded movies. We had books. I had a few preparedness books, including an Army survival manual that contained first-aid information.

So it wasn’t as though all information suddenly disappeared.

But looking back, most of what we had was either entertainment or fairly general preparedness information.

What I didn’t have was much of the practical information that would have made an actual extended outage easier.

One example seems incredibly simple now:

camp stove recipes.

If the power is out and the normal kitchen isn’t available, what can I make with the food already in the house using a small camp stove?

Obviously, you can improvise.

But an emergency is probably not the time I want to discover that every recipe I normally use is bookmarked on a website I can no longer reach.

I also wish we had had more downloaded entertainment.

That might sound trivial compared with water, medical care or food, but I don’t think it is.

When you have a family sitting in a dark house for a couple of days, keeping everyone occupied and maintaining a little bit of normalcy matters.

Preparedness isn’t only about staying alive.

Sometimes it’s about making an uncomfortable situation a little easier.

Since that storm, I’ve given offline information a lot more thought.

Preparedness has a funny way of doing that.

You start with one problem and it leads to another.

You store water, and eventually you start asking how to safely treat more water if your stored supply runs out.

You store food, and then you start thinking about how you would cook it without electricity.

You buy a radio, and then you realize you need to understand frequencies, antennas and how to actually use it.

You buy equipment, and eventually you realize the instruction manual might be sitting on the manufacturer's website.

You start gardening, and suddenly there are questions about planting, harvesting, seed saving, pests and food preservation.

The equipment is only part of the equation.

Knowledge is part of preparedness too.

Today, my list of information I would want available offline is a lot broader than it was during that storm:

And I’m sure that list will continue growing.

The challenge is figuring out how to make all of that information useful.

It would be pretty easy to download hundreds or thousands of PDFs, dump them onto a hard drive and declare the problem solved.

I’m increasingly convinced that isn’t enough.

Imagine the power has been out for three days.

Something breaks.

You vaguely remember downloading a repair manual two years ago.

Now you’re staring at 600 files spread across a collection of poorly named folders trying to remember where you put it.

Technically, you have the information.

Practically, you might as well not.

That is something I think about a lot now.

The goal shouldn’t simply be to store information.

The goal should be to make it easy to find and use when you are tired, stressed, possibly sitting in the dark and dealing with several other problems at the same time.

For me, that probably means a combination of paper and digital information.

Paper has some enormous advantages.

It doesn’t need electricity.

It doesn’t have to boot.

It doesn’t require Wi-Fi.

A printed emergency contact sheet, basic first-aid reference, important household instructions or other critical information can simply sit in a binder until it is needed.

But I also don’t want shelves filled with printed manuals, maps, reference books and thousands of pages of information I may never use.

That’s where digital storage makes sense.

A digital library can contain an enormous amount of information without taking over a room.

But for me, there are two requirements:

It needs to use very little power, and it needs to be easy to use.

During a long outage, I don't want to burn through a significant portion of my available electricity just to access a manual or look something up.

And I don't want using the system to require me to remember complicated commands, folder structures or some technical process I haven’t touched in six months.

If my family needs the information, ideally they should be able to use it too.

That is the part I’m still figuring out.

I don’t have a perfect offline information system today.

There are still things I would normally reach for my phone and Google before remembering that, during the kind of emergency I’m preparing for, Google may not be available.

But I’m thinking about it differently now.

Preparedness isn't just asking:

Do I own the thing I might need?

I’m increasingly asking another question:

Do I know what I need to know if the systems I normally depend on aren't available?

And when I don't know something, do I have another way to find the answer?

That storm only lasted a relatively short time.

Eventually the power came back.

Cellular service recovered.

The internet returned.

Everything went back to normal.

But it gave me a small glimpse of just how dependent I had become on having virtually unlimited information available whenever I wanted it.

I don't necessarily want to eliminate that dependence.

The internet is an incredible tool.

I just don't want it to be my only tool.

Sometime this week, pay attention every time you pick up your phone because you need to know something.

A recipe.

Directions.

A medication question.

An equipment manual.

A weather forecast.

A repair video.

A phone number.

A map.

Then ask yourself:

If the internet disappeared tomorrow, could I still get the information I really needed?

I’ve started asking myself that question a lot more often.

And I’m realizing there are still plenty of answers I need to save.