What happened to everyone? What happened to Earth's infrastructure? If everyone just got raptured, then pop back to Earth and dig up the instruction manuals. If the Earth got resurfaced due to the moon falling onto it, then the answer will be rather different. You need to supply these sorts of details when asking for such an open-ended question.

@StarfishPrime Earth is not inhabitable any more. No way to go there. One can download what is necessary a few days before the death, if the storage capacity permits.

That does not answer my questions, though. "Not inhabitable" as in, it turned to molten lava? Or "not inhabitable" as in, it is all radioactive? Or covered with persistent nerve agent? Or plague? Or killer robot swarms? And how does" no way to get there" work for a mature spacefaring civilisation? Did their spacecraft all get raptured, too?

@StarfishPrime nothing is left, lava. Or grey goo.

Great! Please edit your question to include that critically important detail.

You need to make up your mind, and edit the question accordingly, because having Earth's infrastructure intact and reachable is wildly different from having it all turned to sludge. And if colonists have no ability to travel between planets any more, and no native industry, then they've been deliberately sabotaged (or planned by complete idiots, it would be hard to tell the difference) and they're all going to die.

@StarfishPrime I agree. So, the Earth's infrastructure is destroyed, except some selected valuable bits could be evacuated in the last hours or days.

"Mars (and other settlements) can download data from Earth's internet for some time before Earth's death, but their storage capacity, while big, is still limited" how long & do they have any 3D printing tech that can convert Mars regolith into building components? // if enough time & the answer is yes I can see those 3D printers being converted to print page after page of 'stone' tablets containing practically any information they want, it's going to be a big library mind :) may still change the limits of your data storage though.

@Pelinore In the span of a few months before the disaster they can download data and evacuate some equipment. They have 3D printers, for construction (yes, from Mars soil) or for plastics (for which they lack expendables now as plastic was exported from Earth). Maybe, some for metals as well. "converted to print out page after page of 'stone' tablets" - well, no need. They have some exabytes of storage, but no technology for producing chips. A single phone can store more data than a printer can ever print for hundresds of years.

Data storage is not an issue & time is really their only constraint on data download then?

@Pelinore they can download at any speed, but they have limited storage (at the scale of exabytes) and cannot download anything after the disaster, so they have to pick things.

If they can print out stuff then they have no limit on data storage at all is what I'm saying, the only plausible limit beyond there data storage is how fast they can print those pages.

@Pelinore even if you turn all Mars into stone tablets you cannot print what can be stored on a single hard drive, you do not understand the volumes of data. They have a few datacenters though, both on Mars and on other bodies (they possibly would have to negotiate what is stored by whom)

I'm sorry but you're wrong, ignoring commentary on the scientific data & peoples google chats & twitters about what they had for breakfast this morning you can for sure hold all the worlds scientific knowledge & technical data in a single library, a very big library but that doesn't change the fact, something the size of the pentagon would probably suffice for a paper library, tablets more room than paper of course.

@Pelinore chat and twitter is negligible amount of data. Databases, statistics, neural networks training data, high resolution images and videos - that is what really takes space.

"a very big library but that doesn't change the fact, something the size of the pentagon would probably suffice for a paper library, tablets [need] more room than paper of course" time to print them is your only issue.

@Anixx: no, what really takes the space in today’s world is videos of cats playing. All of the scientific and engineering and comments on same would easily fit into a single google/Amazon/ms data center.

@jmoreno so, they collect what they can. There is possibly data not available in the internet.

"There is possibly data not available in the internet" Perhaps (& if the world's ending maybe not that many people willing to scan & upload that for them), there certainly is now, maybe less so in the future.

@Anixx: There is a 6 minute delay in querying Earth. If there is a fair sized city on Mars, then they will have a data center and that data center will basically contain all human knowledge other than what Mary’s cat did last year. Scientific and engineering data is miniscule. Wikipedia is under a hundred gig (which I believe includes the 1911 Britannica)

@jmoreno for Mars it's actually 30 milutes (one direction) at closest approach.

@Anixx: closest approach is less than 3.25 light minutes, greatest is less than 23. But if you were right, that would be even more incentive to cache everything remotely useful locally. Local cache is going to have everything except cats, and even a lot of cats

@jmoreno "even more incentive to cache everything remotely useful locally" Yep, it's persuasive that they'll already have everything remotely useful on record at their end, the only thing they'd be rushing to download would be the very most recent research & a more complete copy of published history & literature than they might already have.

@jmoreno @Pelinore so, yes, they have cached internet plus some bits they got in the last moments from enterprises and institutions who decided to help.

@Anixx I think so, useful holes for plot in their data isn't excluded, you don't expect any library to be perfect, you can plausibly slide in whatever holes in their info is useful to you for plot but probably best avoid any glaringly obviously useful science knowledge without a good rationale for why it's not there.

@Anixx but it doesn't seem likely they're going to have any really big holes or gaps in their science data unless you throw in some other accident or disaster (than earths death) to their data centre or something, something? religious book burnings (aka data deletions) a few decades later maybe :)

@Anixx: last minute research is unlikely to be useful let alone necessary, unless you are planning on having a mcguffin fix everything. As for missing info, that is easy—accident or sabotage destroying critical bits

@Pelinore The data centers definitely will fail over time without maintenance and spare parts. So they have limited time. They would negotiate between planets who stores what data as the capacity would go down with equipment failing.

Going back to where I came in, that's where a 3D printed stone tablet library comes in handy, hard copy backup :)

@Pelinore If none of the planets is terraformed stone tablets do not make a difference. If machinery and electronics fail, people will die. If people can maintain life-support systems they should be able to access digital data as well.

@Otkin Has nothing to do with anything I've said does it, so tell it to the OP maybe.