The fine folks at WebOS Internals have long been on the leading edge of the webOS homebrew movement. Following the shutdown of webOS hardware development in 2011 and the subsequent exploration of selling webOS somebody other than HP, they put together a handy guide of everything you'd need to know should the back-end services that support webOS go to hell in the proverbial hand basket. Aptly, it's called the webOS Survival Kit.

Following this week's news that HP has sold their webOS assets to LG, the webOS Survival Kit is worth linking to again. HP has held on to the cloud services portion of the webOS business unit and thus still holds the responsibility for maintaining the App Catalog and backup services for the active webOS devices still out there. HP hasn't commented on how long they'll continue to keep these services running, though conventional wisdom is at least two years from the last sale date of webOS hardware (which, firesale-wise, was in December 2011). So at the end of this year we could possibly be looking at the end of webOS support from HP as the cloud division refocuses on enterprise services instead. The end is maybe nigh?

So there's the webOS Survival Kit. The multi-step guide covers installing Preware, moving your contacts away from your webOS Account, setting up your own local backups, and having everything downloaded and set-up on your computer should the worst happen and you have to restore your Pre, Pixi, Veer, or TouchPad without the support of HP's cloud infrastructure.

While some services like the App Catalog and backup will cease to function if HP shuts down the webOS servers, take heart that the core of the webOS device experience will continue to function even if Sunnyvale were to vanish from the planet. Unlike older smartphones, webOS connects directly to the internet - there are no Palm or HP servers you have to go through for your apps to get their content.

Go read up on the webOS Survival Guide by WebOS Internals. It's everything you need to know for the eventual webOSpacolypse.