The 2005-2020 SurvivalBlog archive stick has a couple of issues that have been noticed by customers. Primarily, the issues are with the bonus material included.
1) The “Food” Category has been mistakenly directed to the Firearms category and since this archive is pulled directly from the website, the resulting bonus books that would normally be found in that category are just missing. Because of the way the archive is built, there is no way to reliably send out a fix for that issue so they just are not there. If you have an earlier year archive, you can access those books from that archive, but sadly, there is no way we can place them on this year’s archive. We will repair that error on next year’s archive.
2) Some of this year’s new bonus books are very large and hence unable to be opened by users. We knew this was an issue when we released the archive, but the decision was made by JWR to include them anyway, because many users can open them. The specific problem is that they are scans of actual books and the files are literally much bigger than a normal pdf would be. Some may also show up as “corrupted” due to the large size. (But those are in fact not corrupted files.) We have been able to open all of the files on our laptop computers within about 30 seconds, but there are some customers (mostly those with older computers) who can’t. These files are too large to enable posting replacement files online and that wouldn’t fix the problem anyway. If you have problems opening those files, then you need to find a computer with more resources. Make sure that your computer in not running any other processor-intensive applications when you attempt to open the bonus files.
The archive contains a “data” directory that has all of the files in it. This directory contains over 90,000 files and some older computers will be unable to access it directly. The archive is designed to be used just like you would browse the actual web site. Open the “index.html” file that is in the top directory and it will take you to the first page of the blog. Then use the small calendar at the top of the right hand column to navigate to the specific year/month/date that you want to view. Alternatively, you can use the “Archive” menu item in the right-hand column to bring up a year/month map for faster access to a specific year and/or month and then use the small calendar to access the specific date you want.
Also note that there is no “search” function on the archive. The online web site search is driven by our server and since this archive has to work on many different operating systems, there isn’t an easy way to include a search function directly on it. You can use your computer’s search function to search within the data directory if you want, but you will need a fairly powerful computer to do that. You can also open PDFs and then use the PDF search feature to look for key words. it is
Our apologies for any inconvenience. With an archive this vast — more than 90,000 items — it is difficult to create an offline archive that functions smoothly on multiple platforms of various vintages. – JWR & HJL