Prepping 101: Free and Cheap Survival Publications – 1st Live, Then Rebuild!

Paul Helinski Prepping 101
This is just some of the SurvivalRing.org set of disks, which are now only $35. It comes with an actual hand checked list of materials, and several printed reports that you can get started reading right away. The disks themselves are a bit hard to navigate because they are built as executable zip files, which I had to manually unzip on my computer, and the files are the old DOS 8 character style. But tens of thousands of books and millions of pages for $35, NO BRAINER!

This is just some of the SurvivalRing.org set of disks, which are now only $35. It comes with an actual hand checked list of materials, and several printed reports that you can get started reading right away. The disks themselves are a bit hard to navigate because they are built as executable zip files, which I had to manually unzip on my computer, and the files are the old DOS 8 character style. But tens of thousands of books and millions of pages for $35, NO BRAINER!

SurvivalRing 25,000 Survival and Rebuilding Pubs $35 (On the right side/Paypal)
https://www.survivalring.org/

Western Digital Homesteading Ebooks $10/Disk
https://stores.ebay.com/Western-Digital-Productions/

Patriot Rising Download Page FREE Single Downloads – Paypal Donation for Zip Files
https://patriotrising.com/survival-pdf-files-manuals-guides/

I like to ask myself regularly, what do I take for granted? Because when I asked myself that three years ago, the answer was “everything.” These days I don’t take for granted that there will be food in the supermarket, electricity to pump water out of my well (or from city waterpumps), or that there will be any 911 to call should I need help…with anything. But one of my last pillars to fall was the fact that I really thought that I had enough knowledge, and what I didn’t know I could easily put my hand on, because of the internet. But the more I have thought about how much I rely on the internet, the more I have realized that it is time to downloading information about things I needs. The problem is, re-finding it all and downloading it is time consuming, so I decided to start buying CD and DVD compendiums on things I might need.

I found this site that is one of very few offering complete downloads of military, survival, and homesteading manuals. They also offer a simple Paypal donation system to download several gig zip files. Great deal!

I found this site that is one of very few offering complete downloads of military, survival, and homesteading manuals. They also offer a simple Paypal donation system to download several gig zip files. Great deal!

Separating the wheat from the chaff is really hard when it comes to survival information. Go try searching for “Military Manuals FREE” and see what you get. Sure, you’ll get some useful stuff, like Booby Traps, but you’ll also field manuals on everything from how to dig a latrine to how to use an obscure military radio or generator. The organized repositories for military manuals that used to be prevalent only a few years ago have dwindled to few. This is because “bandwidth” is expensive, and it has to be served by powerful hardware in bulk. A 300 page PDF file is going to be anywhere from 50k to 200 megs, depending on whether the pages are text or scanned images of the book’s pages. I would love to collect it all up for you and give you links to it all, but you guys crush our servers if we have a really popular article and forget to reduce the image file sizes. It isn’t unusual for us to have 20,000 reads on several stories in each digest, just on Monday. If we linked to downloads of tens of megs on our servers, they wouldn’t be able to do it, and we have some serious hardware. These days, if you want military manuals, you can find a few for free, but usually they are located on websites of people who are selling the good stuff burned on a CD, and usually pretty cheap.

These are some of the Western Digital disks I found on Ebay. They have some silly Bigfoot stuff too, and some cool ghost and alternative energy sets, but in the middle of it all are extremely comprehensive survival and homesteading manuals and books, many dating back over 100 years. That's the old-tech we all need right now.

These are some of the Western Digital disks I found on Ebay. They have some silly Bigfoot stuff too, and some cool ghost and alternative energy sets, but in the middle of it all are extremely comprehensive survival and homesteading manuals and books, many dating back over 100 years. That’s the old-tech we all need right now.

Actual survival aids and medical reference are much the same. I have linked to several nuclear pubs in my articles, and I am always amazed at how few people actually download them. A publication like “Nuclear War Survival Skills” is a crucial read for Americans right now, but how many of us will actually read it until we hear that Putin has his finger on the trigger? Think about all the potential threats, Ebola, SARS, Mustard Gas, Anthrax, EMP, Nuke Plant Meltdowns, Earthquakes, Volcanoes etc. Do you know how to protect yourself from these things, with commonly available items? For instance, you can build a really effective fallout shelter out of bags of cement mix. How many people do you think will be rushing to Home Depot to buy a truckload of cement bags when nuclear war is imminent? Not many, because they don’t have any knowledge of what it takes to survival a nuclear war.

Homesteading and country living books are even harder to find. It used to be that you could find just about anything, from log cabin building to bee keeping, but in this new era of the internet, copyright holders have won a lot of battles, so people are afraid to offer any PDF for fear of getting the dreaded lawyer letter. I found a really great resource that I have linked to above. The manuals are available for instant download individually, but if you want to download the big zip files, you have to pay. It doesn’t say how much, so I guess it is anything you feel comfortable with. He has a great resource there that he worked very hard to build, so don’t be cheap.

The SurvivalRing .exe files didn't work on my computer, so I just used Winrar to unzip them manually.

The SurvivalRing .exe files didn’t work on my computer, so I just used Winrar to unzip them manually.

Some people are really passionate about what they do in disseminating this information. I decided to write this article to share with you a large collection I bought a couple months ago that I finally opened. It is from the website SurvivalRing.org, and it has over 25,000 books in 14 CDs and DVDs. I can’t of course say that I have gone through a ton of them, but from what I have seen, there are 4 core volumes, and the rest of the stuff were lesser collections that they put out over the years. For $35, it’s a complete no brainer, assuming that you have a CD/DVD drive connected to your computuer. Those 4 core volumes appear to have been created for 3rd world countries, to give them a library of basic knowledge on basic building skills, and obscure knowledge like how to keep goats.

The main issue that I have with the SurvivalRing disks is that they were created for a bygone era when nobody knew how to unzip a zip file or read a PDF. The files are hidden in self executing .exe files, and one of my computers didn’t like them, even though it has unzip now built into Windows. On a Linux computer I don’t even know if you could open them. So if you buy this package, go into the disks and unzip them onto a drive, then make that your survival materials drive. There are more than 30 gigs of material. Then click through and learn how to find stuff. The archive was created with 8 character old Windows files names, so it is somewhat cryptic. Once you find the single HTML page with images on how to keep goats, you’ll see that it is incredibly cut through the BS information that everyone might need at some point once the infrastructure collapses.

The filenames are somewhat cryptic too. They were made when DOS limited the names of files and folders to 8 characters. Such is the case with old archives.

The filenames are somewhat cryptic too. They were made when DOS limited the names of files and folders to 8 characters. Such is the case with old archives.

The other one I will specifically point out is an Ebay seller called Western Digital. They have a lot of CD/DVD archives for sale that are all of ten bucks, and that have hundreds of well organized PDF books dating back to the late 1800s. I have been buying CDs of manuals for years and I have never seen a more polished and well organized useful package of information. As you can see from the pics, I bought a handful of their disks, and the one warning I would caution is to make sure you look for the ones that say PDF, not just DVD. One of the disks was just a movie on irrigation systems. Otherwise they are top notch.

SO is my computer going to be toast from an EMP? Will there be any electricity? Will I be able to get at this information if I don’t have it? Well I can answer some of that. As I explained in my EMP article, they just aren’t what people think they are. An EMP is caused by an airburst nuke at hundreds of miles elevation. When it goes boom, it radiates waves of energy, all with different frequencies. The worry is that those frequencies will be picked up by antennas here on the ground. Any metal wire can be an antenna, including our power lines. So if the very destructive and powerful low frequency waves are converted into energy from our powerlines, they will cook all of the transformers that those lines are connected to. Small electronics, even those with antennas, don’t really have an antenna capable of capturing that wave energy and turning into destructive energy. High frequency waves don’t have that much energy. Could your house powerline potentially fry some electronics in your house? Yea, maybe, but from the tests we actually have, it is unlikely that even the transformers will burst, but their lives will be shortened.

This is one of the pubs in image form, as scanned pages. Someone went to a great deal of work to site rip all of these things and put them in one place.

This is one of the pubs in image form, as scanned pages. Someone went to a great deal of work to site rip all of these things and put them in one place. I strongly suggest if you buy this set to unzip everything onto a drive. It is 30 gigs. Keep the disks as a backup, but make sure you can access the information on a hard drive first.

Will I have electricity to power a computer? That is really up to you. Last September I thoroughly covered how you can easily and somewhat cheaply put together a solar power system. A big 22 inch all in one computer only eats about 90 watts. A small laptop, like one of those $150 Chromebooks, usually has an adapter under 65 watts. Therefore even one 100 watt solar panel, a small storage battery and 120volt converter could power your computer every day. I have an article coming up on “Survival Computing” where I will show you how you can run a whole security network on a $35 kids development computer called the Raspberry Pi. It will use your television as a screen, and most small TVs use about 100-200 watts, in addition to the 400 milliamps @5volts used by the Pi. If you prepare, there is no reason to believe that you can’t read books and even watch movies every day after the collapse. You just have to prepare now.

Is there going to be internet? Most likely not. The internet was created to have no central control, and it was actually created by the military. The goal of the internet was specifically to preserve communications should part of the control grid go down. But these days the internet is controlled by a handful of companies that are a big part of the current corporate-ocracy that we now live in. Major routers connect us all, and there is very little dial in, where as long as the phone lines are up you can reach the internet. I would not be surprised if the first step in the plan is to disable the internet. Then we would all be forced to get our news from the bought and paid for media companies that have no honest reporting left at all. Long before that, we will no longer be able to get Wikipedia and Youtube. It is just part of what’s probably coming.

Many of the manuals are just one long HTML page with embedded images, much like one of these articles here. But as you can see, they are extremely detailed, and many are in several languages, meant to educate in 3rd world countries.

Many of the manuals are just one long HTML page with embedded images, much like one of these articles here. But as you can see, they are extremely detailed, and many are in several languages, meant to educate in 3rd world countries.

I do have several hundred printed books in my survival library, because I don’t think you can really count on any electricity absolutely. As I explained in my article Tips to Make Survival Not Suck, you can get the whole Encyclopedia Brittanica for cheap these days, little more than shipping actually. Fiction paperbacks of recognized authors are usually the same when you buy them in bulk, and don’t discount yard sales. Whole sets of handyman books are not uncommon. If they bust the Yellowstone Supervolcano, I expect that there won’t be much solar going on for a long time. And though I have a wind generator, I haven’t figured it out yet (stay tuned). If something can go wrong, generally it will in my experience, so if you want to read and learn, it is good to have print books on hand. But from an information archiving perspective, print library or no, these CDs are just a no brainer I’m sorry.

Much of the SurvivalRing disk material is about rebuilding the world after a collapse. There will be a world with people on it in the future (most likely), and those people are going to swap things for other things. There will even be a monetary system that replaces the ones we are stuck with today, and it will most likely begin yet another cycle of rich bankers and tax slaves. But to get there, you really have to bring a marketable skill to the table. You can start on thousands of new learning experiences with the SurvivalRing disks, though the material is hard to navigate at first. I paid $55 for my set. Now it’s on sale for $35, apparently because so few people are actually buying archives of survival pubs. Crazy.

The Western Digital disks are extremely well organized and formatted. $10 a disk may seem expensive, but this was a ton of work, and they lay it right out for you.  I think they are a very good investment.

The Western Digital disks are extremely well organized and formatted. $10 a disk may seem expensive, but this was a ton of work, and they lay it right out for you. I think they are a very good investment.

There will be a world to come. What is it going to look like? Who knows, but surviving until we get there is what every one of us should be focusing on at this point.. You may think that your brain is too old to dig into new stuff to learn, but try it. It isn’t expensive to get started, and some of the initial principles of survival may actually save your life, in the case of nuclear war especially. All of those end of the world movies aren’t coming out for nothing. We are reaching the end now.

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  • Grockman January 13, 2016, 8:15 pm

    This is a marvelous section of your blog. Thanks for running this series. I don’t recall seeing a reference here to the Foxfire books. I am actually ordering the complete set. They seem to have a wealth of knowledge perfectly suited for surviving and thriving in the coming world. Folks might want to check that out.

  • Rich Fleetwood June 28, 2015, 8:36 pm

    Paul,

    Thanks for the feedback. I’ve been creating these disks and info since 2002, and agree that updates and cutting edge access and tools need to be added to the package.

    1. — Remove the “orders 2015=5″ — Done. Not needed, Good call.

    2. — Change EXE files to ZIP files. — Major, and massive, undertaking. With 16 gigs of compressed files, which you need 30 gig to unarchive to, I tried EVERY compression tool on the market to get maximum scrunching. The open source 7-zip compressed the crap out of the files, making it easy to put on as few disks as possible, and also allow downloads of any of the 44 archive files directly from SurvivalRing. Recreating ALL files into ZIP files in the current 4 DVD set of Appropriate Technology probably won’t happen, with the 4 disk Version 4 set of files.

    On the other hand, I’m working on the much newer version 5 set of CD3WD, and will look into going ZIP format. Long term? Putting the entire package, UNARCHIVED, on very large (64 gigabytes) USB pen drives, SD RAM chips or even Micro SD chips would work as well, and finally, the prices are coming down on those types of storage. Even the 1 terabyte pocket drives would be feasible for sharing and accessing easily

    3. — Disk Indexes — Yes, again I agree. Hopefully over this summer, I’ll be able to update each disk with brand new interfaces and listing styles. A full master index is coming, but oh my gosh, what TON OF CODE is that going to be. There are a few dozen files still not on these disks, available only from the PRIVATE file library on SurvivalRing. Emails will be going out this evening to all who have purchased sets this week, with the details and access to the online files.

    Over the years, MANY have asked for a full blown EVERY SINGLE file listing of all the downloadable books on SurvivalRing, because they want to make sure they have gotten every download that I have. I’m ok with them getting everything, but it is and will be very time consuming creating such a master index, which will have to be updated every time I add another batch of files. It will happen, but not in the very near future. It is a wonderful goal to shoot for, and I will be working towards it…on that I can give you my word.

    I very much appreciate the feedback from ANYONE on the SurvivalCD.com package, as well as on SurvivalRing. I actually returned to college at age 43 to get 3 applied science degrees to take my digital projects to the infinite degree. Lots of ways and directions to go in updating, but I am thinking about all my web and digital projects every day. You should see my project tracking notes, both hardcopy and digital. Ungodly amounts of sorted and prioritized projects, sites, books, articles, and more…years of projects always at my fingertips. Check off a few of them each day…

    • Administrator June 28, 2015, 11:20 pm

      The .exe files are just zip files that are meant to unzip themselves. You should get the same level of compression from just regular old .zip, and it should actually save space. I like the Mother Earth approach of putting it on a USB stick. I bought their back issues today for $49.

  • Rich Fleetwood June 26, 2015, 12:56 am

    Wow, Paul!! Thanks for the kind words. I’ve had a slew of orders this week since you shared your review of the SurvivalRing.org/SurvivalCd package. Orders being packed and going out Monday via Priority. You’re got a great group of folks here and I’ve seriously glad to help. Your article is awesome, well researched and pretty definitive on the current web offerings of our genre.

    I will be adding 22,000 field manuals to the SurvivalCD package this year, and I’ve got another 109 gigs of digital files to offer for download. I’ve been with my host for 14 years and have yet to see a limit put in place on my site because of downloads. The last 12 months has seen nearly 5 terabytes of data downloaded from my site, so regarding your reference, MOST big survival download sites do hit limits…my hosting has backed up their sales verbiage of unlimited sites and bandwidth. Hope with another 140 gigs added for access, they’ll continue.

    One correction if I may…you’ve got one of your SurvivalRing links listed as SurvivalRing.com. Not mine…it’s a squatter that I will be dealing with soon. SurvivalRing.ORG is the correct address.

    The Appropriate Tech library is a mirror of Alex Wiers CD3WD package, version 4. I’ve got his V5 (5 DVD) update, and will be upgrading the package to that version in the next few weeks. His V6 package actually increases his library to upwards of 650 gigs, but that library version is full of duplication, mostly in the same info, in a ton of different languages. I’m debating whether to create a 1 terabyte pocket hard drive of all I have now, with possibly his V6 information package.

    Your comment about rebuilding “the world after a collapse” info, is close to the data’s actual use, but it was created to bring simple technology, to the “appropriate” level of the peoples, tribes, survivors, and communities that literally are dying in the arid regions of the world, or under developed nations that get hit with huge disasters, such as Nepal and the recent 8+ quake. These are the kind of events that catch the attention of the Peace Corps and UN NGOs, who usually go to try to make a difference, but then redirect aid and resources to people that DON’T need it.

    Think of a hundred different ways to build a shelter from the elements after a catastrophe, using dirt, mud, adobe, or a dozen other materials…whatever is usable…and giving the victims a reboot to get going again. The exact kind of thing we in the US would have to do, should we see another civil war, that ever dreaded phrase “martial law”, or any of a thousand natural disasters that are always happening around the world.

    When you have nothing, having the skills and information studied beforehand is a very good skill and/or trade to have. Now about those shelters, think of a ton of ways to create fresh, potable water…find nourishment in whatever plants or animals are left alive, basic alternative power creation, simple communications, and more. It’s all in the appropriate technology package.

    Anyway, thanks again to ALL of you for your support. I think you’ll find the full package a wonderful addition to your prepper/survival library. As optical disks, the package is EMP proof. Plus, you receive all the disks in a two DVD case presentation kit, which takes up literally ONE INCH of shelf space next to your hardcopy library…

    You guys keep up the great work…I’ll be joining the forums later this week.
    Rich

    • Rich Fleetwood June 26, 2015, 1:01 am

      Just a side note that bears attention…many of the Patriot Rising site library downloads originated on my SurvivalRing website many years ago, over a decade in fact. You’ll find that has happened on many other survival ebook websites, with most not even changing the filename. Just thought I’d save you folks a little bit of time as you build your collections. You can tell many of these files because the first page of my electronic files will tell you that the file originated at SurvivalRing.

    • Administrator June 26, 2015, 7:52 am

      Hi Rich, thanks for stopping by. I fixed the .com links thanks for the note on that. A couple piece of advice:

      1. Remove the “orders 2015=5” from the website. You probably would have had twenty times more orders if that was not there, because it just says hey I’m one of 5 losers who thought this had value this year.

      2. If you are going to rebuild the package, I would get rid of the .exe files, and just leave them as zips or rars. Windows now has native unzipping, and you will make the disks more accessible to users on Linux, which you can run on a far thinner platform than windows. The exe files didn’t work on my windows 8 computers.

      3. The disks could use better indexes of what is on them. A master index explaining each disk and how it differs from the others would also be helpful. It’s a great master dump, but ultimately you want to be able to use the material and that is very difficult without good indexes and 8 character file names.

      -ph

  • ash1low June 23, 2015, 4:02 pm

    Good news!
    Got the password and login problem resolved by going through PayPal. Downloading files as I write. The message was that his real job is kicking his a**. He provided an updated password and login. Have to type in the password, copy/paste would not work for me.

  • ash1low June 22, 2015, 9:03 pm

    Might want to wait a few days before leaving a donation to: http://patriotrising.com/survival-pdf-files-manuals-guides/
    Made a donation early today and received a page with login and password.
    It seems that the password is not acceptable. Have left three messages requesting the correct password with no response 12 hrs later.

  • Brian Minnick June 22, 2015, 6:37 pm

    Backwoodshome.com and survivalblog.com and always motherearthnews.com

  • Q June 22, 2015, 2:04 pm
    • Administrator June 22, 2015, 3:40 pm

      nice find thanks.

  • oldLady June 22, 2015, 9:43 am

    The set of books called Fox Fire is worth the money on eBay . They have a lot of the old ways of doing just about everything you need to survive. Nothing about solar or wind genartors. These great off grid survive books.

    • Administrator June 22, 2015, 10:09 am

      I have the foxfire books and I don’t see there that there is so much useful in them, compared to these disks.

    • wRecKaGe June 22, 2015, 5:43 pm

      Mother Earth News is currently offering their entire library of issues as a DVD compendium (also available on a flash drive) for a very reasonable cost. It contains every article published to date by that esteemed journal of self reliance. Just thought I’d throw that out there as one more source of offline accessible info on a ton of great survival and off/on grid living topics at a very reasonable cost.

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