a) Well, to start with, the matter that directly consitutes all those hard drives and CDROMS and DVD-ROMS and other storage media would take up way way way way more storage space to encode their physical material states in binary code than they themselves have available, so if you want to store everything in that fashion and not just the humans you’ve got one heck of a bootstrap problem.
b) Ignoring that, there’s a basic “where you gonna store it, bub?” question that inheres from the impending loss of the world’s supply of hard drives and CDROMS and whatnot along with the rest of the world. Unless you can get Cosmic FedEx to transport all this storage media to a safe planetoid before the cataclysm, storing everything in that fashion isn’t going to help you much, now is it?
c) I seem to recall an IBM experiment in which a subatomic particle’s relevant information was beamed to a receiver which was capable of recreating an identical subatomic particle based on that information. Here’s the Master’s discussion thereof. Cecil says:
I think 10 to the 32nd power is a hundred nonillion. Divide a hundred nonillion by eight to convert bits to bytes and you’re looking at 12 nonillion 500 octillion bytes. Convert bytes to exabytes — umm, will you forgive me if I use the decimal approximation here? — an exabyte appears to be 10^18 bytes, so we’ll just rip 18 zeros off the end. Looks like a hundred and twenty five trillion exabytes per person, if my math is worth a damn, and if the resolution Braunstein describes as “fairly coarse” is sufficient to restore them from backup. And as Cecil points out in the above-referenced article, that’s going to put your fastest FireWire 800 card through its paces for a very very prolonged performance test.
Hope this helps.