It's 2 AM. A transformer blows somewhere down the street and your power goes out. You reach for your phone -- 6% battery. You open it to pull up your insurance company's number, your utility provider's outage line, the pediatrician's after-hours number because your kid just woke up wheezing. The screen dims. The battery icon turns red. And then it's gone.
Everything you need -- every number, every account, every medication, every instruction -- is locked behind a black screen. You're standing in your own kitchen, in the dark, and you functionally know nothing about how your household operates.
That moment is why we wrote this book.
What The Analog Backup Is
The Analog Backup is a 19-chapter nonfiction book about a problem almost nobody talks about: we've moved every piece of critical household information into the cloud, onto devices, behind passwords and apps and services that require power and connectivity to function. And then we've made zero plans for what happens when those things aren't available.
This isn't a gear list. It's not a prepper manual. There are no chapters about water purification tablets or how to start a fire with a shoelace. It's a practical, structured guide for normal families who want to stop being one dead battery away from household chaos. It builds on the same foundational principles that Ready.gov and the American Red Cross have been teaching for years, but reframes them for a world that runs on Wi-Fi and cloud storage.
The book was written by the founder of HRDCOPY after the Neil Creek Fire came within miles of his home and forced a near-evacuation with zero preparation. No grab bag. No document folder. No written plan. Just a family standing in a driveway realizing they had no idea where anything important was, and no way to access it without the internet.
That experience became this book.
What's Inside
The book follows a deliberate arc -- from understanding the problem to building the solution.
The problem we don't see. The first three chapters lay out how we got here. How we've outsourced our survival knowledge to screens. How the cloud creates an illusion of safety. And why resilience isn't the same thing as prepping -- not even close.
The four pillars. Chapters 4 through 8 cover the foundational categories every household manual needs: Communication (who do you call and how), Medical (what does your family need to survive medically without an app), Financial (can you access your money when the bank's website is down), and Infrastructure (do you actually know how your house works).
Real threats, real protocols. Chapters 9 through 11 move from theory into scenarios you might actually face -- shelter-in-place events, earthquakes, and the slow-motion disasters like job loss and economic disruption that don't make the news but wreck households just as effectively.
Twelve scenario playbooks. Two full chapters of step-by-step protocols for real events: house fires, medical emergencies, severe weather, extended power outages, evacuations, and more. Not theory. Not principles. Actual instructions your family can follow when nobody can think straight.
Building and maintaining it. Chapters 15 through 18 walk you through assembling, formatting, distributing, and keeping your manual current. Because a manual you built two years ago and never updated is almost as useless as no manual at all.
Travel and venue safety. Chapter 19 takes the framework outside your home -- hotels, Airbnbs, event venues, unfamiliar cities. The places where you have the least information and the most vulnerability.
Read Four Chapters Free
You don't need to take our word for any of this. The first four chapters of The Analog Backup are available to read right now at /book. No email required. No paywall on the preview. Just the content.
Here's what you'll get:
- The Introduction: The Babysitter Protocol -- the scenario that started everything
- Chapter 1: The Black Mirror -- what happens when screens fail
- Chapter 2: The Cloud Is Not Waterproof -- why digital storage isn't backup
- Chapter 3: Resilience vs. Prepping -- the distinction that changes everything
If those four chapters don't convince you the rest is worth reading, fair enough. But they will.
The Book vs. The Dossier
People sometimes ask how the book relates to the HRDCOPY dossier. Here's the short version: they're complements, not competitors.
The book teaches you WHY and HOW. It's the philosophy, the framework, the understanding of what your household actually needs to function when infrastructure fails. It explains the principles and walks you through the thinking.
The dossier IS the manual. It's the actual, physical, printed document -- personalized to your family, your address, your risks, your medical information, your financial accounts, your emergency contacts. It's the execution of everything the book describes.
Read the book to understand what you're building and why it matters. Then build your dossier at /signup to put it into practice. The book gives you the blueprint. HRDCOPY gives you the finished product.
The Question That Started This
The entire book orbits a single question. It's the question we ask every family we work with. It's the question that, if you answer honestly, tells you exactly how prepared your household actually is:
"If I am not there, and the internet is not working, does my household function?"
If the answer is yes -- if your family can access critical information, follow emergency procedures, contact the right people, and make decisions without you and without a screen -- then you're in better shape than 95% of households in this country.
If the answer is no, you have some work to do. And this book is where you start.
Read the first four chapters free at /book. No account. No email. Just the content.