"everything else is intact" - in what state would be millions of other computers and their hard drives? Why the survivors should pay special attention to my computer?

@Alexander You are a mad prepper hacker who hacked the mobile phone network and sent the message to all the phones in the network with coordinates of your computer and information about your 10TB civilisation-saving HDD. Any other plot device would work equally well. The question is about the information, not you, your computer, or the plot parts related to the retrieval of this information.

What is the average educational level of those 150 survivors? How much time has passed since the apocalypse event (so what state of human infrastructure should we expect to find)?

Are these 150 people the only ones on board with the restart-the-world plan, or are they the only survivors period?

At the very minimum you'd need a book about selective breeding and how to minimize recessive medical conditions, the rest is moot if the 150 all die out.

It's worth noting the entirety of Wikipedia can be compressed to fewer than 20GB. That alone is a treasure trove of knowledge regarding human society and advancements.

Unless it is a VERY specially selected 150 people, they will very likely die out. They are incredibly unlikely to have the skills to survive. They are incredibly unlikely to know enough about even the subject headings of the skills required in order to look them up in Wikipedia. Maybe if it included 120 old-order Mennonites who already knew what it takes to live without "all that." Learning, for example, how to shoe a horse is very difficult without an experienced person helping you. Learning from a book is going to be hard, and hard on the horses. Oh... Wait...

a windows machine? why not linux? its sources will add another 20 gb of useful data

150 people is too small to preserve genetic health. Your population will soon start to develop genetic defects and in few generations would most probably die out. Unless there are other surviving groups they will meet, obviously.

You want to know a lot about reproductive medicine. Neal Stephenson explores a similar scenario, just a tad more severe (survivors must survive in space, and there is only a handful of them, and they are all female), in Seveneves.

"except for things that need active maintenance from humans". Depending on how much time passes, I think most of anything human-made decays/degrades in the long term.

The greatest limitation on the usefulness of the information will actually be the fact you only have 1 day to compile it. If humanity had a year to make said manual its going to look a lot different then when it only has a day.

@IvanBorsuk yeah I was going to say "Oh snap! All this data and they won't even be able to use it because their Windows machine doesn't have ext4 support..."

@Archelaos Have any source for that, or just assuming? newscientist.com/article/… - this lists 160 with the possibility of cutting down to 80

@PausePause: Is that including all graphics?

FYI: the size of the current version of all English Wikipedia articles (text only) compressed is about 19.52 GB (link)

@TCooper Not really, that is the number I remember reading but I won't be able to point to a source. By the way, article assume the group will be specifically selected and return to the general population within 200years/8-10 generations and living in protected environment (have they even considered sociological challenges of such group closed in eternal prison and for entire lives breeding and maintaining the prison?). In a random group of survivors you will have problems making everybody to just breed like cattle.

Tomorrow? It will take far longer than that just to decide what to save! And then negotiate for access to it! Sure you'd like to include a copy of every scientific paper every published and every patent, but do you know how much red tape is in the way of that?

@Archelaos Good call on returning to gen. population. I'd still bet it's feasible with a pre-selected group of 150, although obviously not ideal. It would also require prescribed mating, and no such thing as a monogamous relationship

the global doomsday library in Norway may be helpful. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_World_Archive